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B.C. crime survey reveals distrust in justice system, regional divides

Published

2 months ago

9 minute read

By Alexandra Keeler

In late August, the RCMP seized nearly 40 kilograms of illegal drugs and half-a-million dollars in cash from a home in Prince George, B.C., while responding to a break-and-enter call.

The RCMP linked the drug operation to organized crime and said it was one of the largest busts in the history of the 80,000-person city, which is located in the B.C. heartland.

“It is obvious we can no longer ignore the effects of the B.C. gang conflict in Prince George, as this is a clear indication that more than our local drug traffickers are using Prince George as a base of operations,” Insp. Darin Rappel, interim detachment commander for the Prince George RCMP, told local media at the time.

It is operations such as these that may be contributing to a perception among British Columbians — particularly those in northern parts of the province — that crime rates are rising.

A survey released Sept. 24 shows a majority of respondents believe B.C. crime rates are up — and often unreported — even though official crime data suggest the opposite.

The survey was commissioned by Save Our Streets, a coalition of more than 100 B.C. community and business groups that is calling for non-partisan, province-wide efforts to establish safer communities in the face of widespread mental health and addiction issues and lack of confidence in the justice system.

“I’m glad that we have our data,” said Jess Ketchum, co-founder of Save Our Streets. “[N]ow we can show that, ‘Look, 88 per cent of the public in B.C. believe that crime is going unreported.’”

“[And] the reason that it’s going unreported is that they’ve lost faith in the justice system,” he said.

‘Revolving doors’ 

Fifty-five per cent of the 1,200 British Columbians who participated in the survey said they believed criminal activity had increased over the past four years. The survey did not specify types of crime, though it mentioned concerns about violence against employees, vandalism and theft.

But crime data tells a different story. B.C. crime rates fell eight per cent during the years 2020 to 2023, according to Statistics Canada.

Underreporting of crime may partly explain the trend. A 2019 nationwide Statistics Canada survey of individuals aged 15 years and older showed only 29 per cent of violent and non-violent incidents were reported to police. Victims often cited the crime being minor, not important, or no one being harmed as reasons for not reporting.

What is clear is many British Columbians perceive crime is being underreported: 88 per cent of all survey respondents said they believe many crimes go unreported.
Perceptions of Crime & Public Safety in British Columbia. Online survey commissioned by Save Our Streets, conducted by Research Co. with a representative sample of 1,200 British Columbians, Sept 9-12, 2024. (Graphic: Alexandra Keeler)

Mario Canseco, president of Research Co., the public research company that conducted the Save Our Streets survey, attributes the gap between actual and perceived crime rates to the heightened visibility of mental health and addiction issues in the media.

“You look at the reports, you watch television news, listen to the radio, or read the newspaper, and you see that something happened, or that there was a high-profile attack,” said Canseco. “That leads people to believe that things are going badly.”

Survey respondents, though, attributed the lack of crime reporting to a lack of confidence in the justice system, with 75 per cent saying they believe an inadequate court system is to blame. Eighty-seven per cent said they supported bail reform to keep repeat offenders in custody while awaiting trial.

“There was support [in the survey results] for judicial reform that would allow for steps to resolve the revolving doors of the justice system when it comes to repeat offenders,” said Ketchum.

Cowboys

The survey highlighted regional differences in perceptions of B.C. crime rates and views on whether addiction-related crime ought to be addressed as a public health or law enforcement issue.

Respondents from Northern B.C., Prince George and the surrounding Cariboo region were more likely to say they believed criminal activity had increased than respondents from southern and coastal regions of the province. 

Canseco suggests that drug use and associated crime are now becoming more apparent in smaller communities, as the drug crisis has spread beyond the major cities of Vancouver and Victoria. Residents of these communities may thus see these problems as more novel and alarming, he says.

Eighty-four per cent of respondents in Northern B.C. said they viewed opioid addiction as a health issue, while only 68 per cent of respondents in Prince George/Cariboo shared this perspective.

Respondents from Prince George/Cariboo exhibited the strongest preference for punitive measures regarding addiction and mental health, with nearly unanimous support for harsher penalties, bail reform and increased police presence.

“It’s one of the tougher areas in the province … somewhat more cowboys,” Ketchum said about Prince George and the Cariboo region, where his hometown of Quesnel is located. “I think there’s less tolerance.”

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Differences in each region’s demographic makeup may also help to explain differing sentiments.

Northern B.C. has the highest concentration of B.C.’s Indigenous population, with about 17 per cent of the population identifying as Indigenous, versus eight per cent in Prince George.

Indigenous communities tend to emphasize addiction as a health issue rooted in historical trauma and social inequities, and prefer community-based healing over punitive measures. Indigenous communities are also frequently distrustful of the RCMP, given its history of being used to extend colonial control.

A majority of all survey respondents favoured investing in mental health facilities, drug education campaigns and rehabilitation over harm-reduction strategies such as safer supply programs, supervised injection sites and drug decriminalization.

“People want to see a more holistic approach [to the drug crisis],” said Canseco. “[T]he voter who hasn’t been exposed to something like [harm reduction], and who may be reacting to what they see on social media, is having a harder time understanding whether this is actually going to help.”

“I was pleased to see the level of support for more investments in recovery, more investments in treatment, around the province,” said Ketchum.

But Ketchum says the preference of some respondents for punitive approaches to B.C. crime rates – particularly in the province’s more northern regions — worries him.

“I believe that if governments don’t respond adequately now, and this is allowed to escalate, that there’ll be more and more instances of people taking these things into their own hands.”

This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.

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Addictions

London Police Chief warns parliament about “safer supply” diversion

Published on December 7, 2024

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London Police Chief Thai Truong testifies to House of Commons Standing Committee on November 26, 2024.

By Adam Zivo

“Vulnerable individuals are being targeted by criminals who exchange these prescriptions for fentanyl, exacerbating addiction and community harm,” said London Police Chief Thai Truong.

Thai Truong, the police chief of London, Ontario, testified in parliament last week that “safer supply” opioids are “obviously” being widely diverted to the black market, leading to greater profits for organized crime. His insights further illustrate that the safer supply diversion crisis is not disinformation, as many harm reduction advocates have speciously claimed.

Truong’s testimony was given to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health, which is in the midst of an extended study into the opioid crisis. While the committee has heard from dozens of witnesses, Truong’s participation was particularly notable, as safer supply was first piloted in London in 2016 and the city has, since then, been a hotbed for opioid diversion.

“While the program is well intentioned, we are seeing concerning outcomes related to the diversion of safe supply medications… these diverted drugs are being resold within our community, trafficked to other jurisdictions, and even used as currency to obtain fentanyl, perpetuating the illegal drug trade,” he said in his opening speech. “Vulnerable individuals are being targeted by criminals who exchange these prescriptions for fentanyl, exacerbating addiction and community harm.”

He later clarified to committee members that these vulnerable individuals include women who are being pressured to obtain safer supply opioids for black market resale.

Safer supply programs are supposed to provide pharmaceutical-grade addictive drugs – mostly 8-mg tablets of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin – as an alternative to riskier street substances. The programs generally supply these drugs at no cost to recipients, with almost no supervised consumption, and have a strong preference for Dilaudid, a brand of hydromorphone that is manufactured by Purdue Pharma.

Addiction experts and police leaders across Canada have reported that safer supply patients regularly divert their hydromorphone to the black market. A recent study by Dr. Brian Conway, director of Vancouver’s Infectious Disease Centre, for example, showed that a quarter of his safer supply patients diverted all of their hydromorphone, and that another large, but unknown, percentage diverted at least some of their pills.

Truong’s parliamentary testimony, which mostly rehashed information he shared in a press conference last July, further corroborated these concerns.

He noted that in 2019, the city’s police force seized 847 hydromorphone pills, of which only 75 were 8-mg Dilaudids. Seizures increased after access to safer supply expanded in 2020, and, by 2023, exploded to over 30,000 pills (a roughly 3,500 per cent increase), of which roughly half were 8-mg Dilaudids. During this period, the number of annual overdose deaths in the city also increased from 73 to 123 (a 68 per cent increase), he said.

Relatedly, Truong noted that the price of hydromorphone in London – $2-5 a pill – is now much lower than in other parts of the province.

As an increasing number of police departments across Canada have publicly acknowledged that they are seeing skyrocketing hydromorphone seizures, some safer supply advocates have claimed, without evidence, that these pills were mostly stolen from pharmacies, and not diverted by safer supply patients. Truong’s parliamentary testimony dispelled this myth: “These increases cannot be attributed to pharmacy thefts, as London has had only one pharmacy robbery since 2019.”

The police chief declined to answer repeated questions about the efficacy of safer supply, or to opine on whether the experimental program should be replaced with alternative interventions with stronger evidence bases. “I’m not here to criticize the safe supply program, but to address the serious challenges associated with its diversion,” he said, noting his own lack of medical expertise.

The chief emphasized that, while more needs to be done to stop safer supply diversion, the addiction crisis is a “complex issue” that cannot be tackled solely through law enforcement. He advocated for a “holistic” approach that integrates prevention, harm reduction and treatment, and acknowledged the importance of London’s community health and social service partners.

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In response to Truong’s testimony, NDP MP Gord Johns, an avid safer supply advocate, downplayed the importance of the diversion crisis by arguing that “people aren’t dying from a safer supply of drugs; they’re dying from fentanyl.”

While it is true that 81 per cent of overdose deaths in 2024 involved fentanyl, addiction physicians across Canada have repeatedly debunked Johns’ argument as misleading. The dangers of diverted hydromorphone is not that it directly kills users, but rather that it easily hooks individuals into addiction, leading many of them to graduate to deadly fentanyl use.

Johns previously faced criticism when, in a September health committee meeting, he seemingly used parliamentary maneuvers to reduce the speaking time of a grieving father, Greg Sword, whose daughter, Kamilah, died of drug-related causes after she and her friends got hooked on diverted hydromorphone.

There is currently no credible evidence that safer supply works. Most supporting studies simply interview safer supply patients and present their opinions as objective fact, despite significant issues with bias and reliability. Data presented in a 2024 study published in the British Medical Journal, which followed over 5,000 drug users in B.C., showed that safer supply led to no statistically significant mortality reductions once confounding factors were fully filtered out.

An impending update to Canada’s National Opioid Use Disorder Guideline, which was recently presented at a conference  organized by the Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine, determined that the evidence base for safer supply is “essentially low-level.” Similarly, B.C’s top doctor acknowledged earlier this year that safer supply is “not fully evidence-based.”

This article was syndicated in The Bureau, an online media publication that investigates foreign interference, organized crime, and the drug trade.

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Addictions

BC Addictions Expert Questions Ties Between Safer Supply Advocates and For-Profit Companies

Published on November 24, 2024

By

By Liam Hunt

Canada’s safer supply programs are “selling people down the river,” says a leading medical expert in British Columbia. Dr. Julian Somers, director of the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction at Simon Fraser University, says that despite the thin evidence in support of these experimental programs, the BC government has aggressively expanded them—and retaliated against dissenting researchers.

Somers also, controversially, raises questions about doctors and former health officials who appear to have gravitated toward businesses involved in these programs. He notes that these connections warrant closer scrutiny to ensure public policies remain free from undue industry influence.

Safer supply programs claim to reduce overdoses and deaths by distributing free addictive drugs—typically 8-milligram tablets of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin—to dissuade addicts from accessing riskier street substances. Yet, a growing number of doctors say these programs are deeply misguided—and widely defrauded.

Ultimately, Somers argues, safer supply is exacerbating the country’s addiction crisis.

Somers opposed safer supply at its inception and openly criticized its nationwide expansion in 2020. He believes these programs perpetuate drug use and societal disconnection and fail to encourage users to make the mental and social changes needed to beat addiction. Worse yet, the safer supply movement seems rife with double standards that devalue the lives of poorer drug users. While working professionals are provided generous supports that prioritize recovery, disadvantaged Canadians are given “ineffective yet profitable” interventions, such as safer supply, that “convey no expectation that stopping substance use or overcoming addiction is a desirable or important goal.”

To better understand addiction, Somers created the Inter-Ministry Evaluation Database (IMED) in 2004, which, for the first time in BC’s history, connected disparate information—i.e. hospitalizations, incarceration rates—about vulnerable populations.

Throughout its existence, health experts used IMED’s data to create dozens of research projects and papers. It allowed Somers to conduct a multi-million-dollar randomized control trial (the “Vancouver at Home” study) that showed that scattering vulnerable people into regular apartments throughout the city, rather than warehousing them in a few buildings, leads to better outcomes at no additional cost.

In early 2021, Somers presented recommendations drawn from his analysis of the IMED to several leading officials in the B.C. government. He says that these officials gave a frosty reception to his ideas, which prioritized employment, rehabilitation, and social integration over easy access to drugs. Shortly afterwards, the government ordered him to immediately and permanently delete the IMED’s ministerial data.

Somers describes the order as a “devastating act of retaliation” and says that losing access to the IMED effectively ended his career as a researcher. “My lab can no longer do the research we were doing,” he noted, adding that public funding now goes exclusively toward projects sympathetic to safer supply. The B.C. government has since denied that its order was politically motivated.

In early 2022, the government of Alberta commissioned a team of researchers, led by Somers, to investigate the evidence base behind safer supply. They found that there was no empirical proof that the experiment works, and that harm reduction researchers often advocated for safer supply within their studies even if their data did not support such recommendations.

Somers says that, after these findings were published, his team was subjected to a smear campaign that was partially organized by the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use (BCCSU), a powerful pro-safer supply research organization with close ties to the B.C. government. The BCCSU has been instrumental in the expansion of safer supply and has produced studies and protocols in support of it, sometimes at the behest of the provincial government.

Somers is also concerned about the connections between some of safer supply’s key proponents and for-profit drug companies.

He notes that the BCCSU’s founding executive director, Dr. Evan Wood, became Chief Medical Officer at Numinus Wellness, a publicly traded psychedelic company, in 2020. Similarly, Dr. Perry Kendall, who also served as a BCCSU executive director, went on to found Fair Price Pharma, a now-defunct for-profit company that specializes in providing pharmaceutical heroin to high-risk drug users, the following year.

While these connections are not necessarily unethical, they do raise important questions about whether there is enough industry regulation to minimize potential conflicts of interest, whether they be real or perceived.

The BCCSU was also recently criticized in an editorial by Canadian Affairs, which noted that the organization had received funding from companies such as Shoppers Drug Mart and Tilray (a cannabis company). The editorial argued that influential addiction research organizations should not receive drug industry funding and reported that Alberta founded its own counterpart to the BCCSU in August, known as the Canadian Centre of Recovery Excellence, which is legally prohibited from accepting such sponsorships.

Already, private interests are betting on the likely expansion of safer supply programs. For instance, Safe Supply Streaming Co., a publicly traded venture capital firm, has advertised to potential investors that B.C.’s safer supply system could create a multi-billion-dollar annual market.

Somers believes that Canada needs more transparency regarding how for-profit companies may be directly or indirectly influencing policy makers: “We need to know exactly, to the dollar, how much of [harm reduction researchers’] operating budget is flowing from industry sources.”

Editor’s note: This story is published in syndication with Break The Needle and Western Standard.

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Dr. Julian M. Somers is director of the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction at Simon Fraser University. He was Director of the UBC Psychology Clinic, and past president of the BC Psychological Association. Liam Hunt is a contributing author to the Centre For Responsible Drug Policy in partnership with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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