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Does America’s ‘drug czar’ hold lessons for Canada?

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Harry Anslinger (center) discussing cannabis control with Canadian narcotics chief Charles Henry Ludovic Sharman and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Stephen B. Gibbons in 1938. (Photo credit: United States Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs division)

By Alexandra Keeler

The US has had a drug czar for decades. Experts share how this position has shaped US drug policy—and what it could mean for Canada

Last week, Canada announced it would appoint a “fentanyl czar” to crack down on organized crime and border security.

The move is part of a suite of security measures designed to address US President Donald Trump’s concerns about fentanyl trafficking and forestall the imposition of 25 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods.

David Hammond, a health sciences professor and research chair at the University of Waterloo, says, “There is no question that Canada would benefit from greater leadership and co-ordination in substance use policy.”

But whether Canada’s fentanyl czar “meets these needs will depend entirely on the scope of their mandate,” he told Canadian Affairs in an email.

Canadian authorities have so far provided few details about the fentanyl czar’s powers and mandate.

A Feb. 4 government news release says the czar will focus on intelligence sharing and collaborating with US counterparts. Canada’s Public Safety Minister, David McGuinty, said in a Feb. 4 CNN interview that the position “will transcend any one part of the government … [It] will pull together a full Canadian national response — between our provinces, our police of local jurisdiction, and work with our American authorities.”

Canada’s approach to the position may take cues from the US, which has long had its own drug czar. Canadian Affairs spoke to several US historians of drug policy to better understand the nature and focus of this role in the US.

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The first drug czar

The term “czar” refers to high-level officials who oversee specific policy areas and have broad authority across agencies.

Today, the US drug czar’s official title is director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The director is appointed by the president and responsible for advising the president and coordinating a national drug strategy.

Taleed El-Sabawi, a legal scholar and public health policy expert at Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich., said the Office of National Drug Control Policy has two branches: a law enforcement branch focused on drug supply, and a public health branch focused on demand for drugs.

“Traditionally, the supply side has been the focus and the demand side has taken a side seat,” El-Sabawi said.

David Herzberg, a historian at University at Buffalo in Buffalo, N.Y., made a similar observation.

“US drug policy has historically been dominated by moral crusading — eliminating immoral use of drugs, and policing [or] punishing the immoral people (poor, minority, and foreign/traffickers) responsible for it,” Herzberg told Canadian Affairs in an email.

Harry Anslinger, who was appointed in 1930 as the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, is considered the earliest iteration of the US drug czar. The bureau later merged into the Drug Enforcement Administration, the lead federal agency responsible for enforcing US drug laws.

Anslinger prioritized enforcement, and his impact was complex.

“He was part of a movement to characterize addicts as depraved and inferior individuals and he supported punitive responses not just to drug dealing but also to drug use,” said Caroline Acker, professor emerita of history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa.

But Anslinger also cracked down on the pharmaceutical industry. He restricted opioid production, effectively making it a low-profit, tightly controlled industry, and countered pharmaceutical public relations campaigns with his own.

“The Federal Bureau of Narcotics [at the time could] in fact be seen as the most robust national consumer protection agency, with powers to regulate and constrain major corporations that the [Food and Drug Administration] could only dream of,” said Herzberg.

The punitive approach to drugs put in place by Anslinger was the dominant model until the Nixon administration. In 1971, President Richard Nixon created an office dedicated to drug abuse prevention and appointed Jerome Jaffe as drug czar.

Jaffe established a network of methadone treatment facilities across the US. Nixon initially combined public health and law enforcement to combat rising heroin use among Vietnam War soldiers, calling addiction the nation’s top health issue.

However, Nixon later reverted back to an enforcement approach when he used drug policy to target Black communities and anti-war activists.

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Nixon’s top domestic policy aide, John Ehrlichman, said in a 1994 interview.

Michael Botticelli, Acting Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy March 7, 2014 – Jan. 20, 2017 under President Barack Obama. [Photo Credit: Executive Office of the President of the United States]

Back and forth

More recently, in 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Michael Botticelli as drug czar. Botticelli was the first person in active recovery to hold the role.

The Obama administration recognized addiction as a chronic brain disease, a view already accepted in scientific circles but newly integrated into national drug policy. It reduced drug possession sentences and emphasized prevention and treatment.

Trump, who succeeded Obama in 2016, prioritized law enforcement while rolling back harm reduction. In 2018, his administration called for the death penalty for drug traffickers, and in 2019, sued to block a supervised consumption site in Philadelphia, Pa.

Trump appointed James Carroll as drug czar in 2017. But in 2018 Trump proposed slashing the office’s budget by more than 90 per cent and transferring authority for key drug programs to other agencies. Lawmakers blocked the plan, however, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy remained intact.

In 2022, President Joe Biden appointed Dr. Rahul Gupta, the first medical doctor to serve as drug czar. Herzberg says Gupta also prioritized treatment, by, for example, expanding access to naloxone and addiction medications. But he also cracked down on drug trafficking.

In December 2024, Gupta outlined America’s international efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking, naming China, Mexico, Colombia and India as key players — but not Canada.

Gupta’s last day was Jan. 19. Trump has yet to appoint someone to the role.

Canada’s fentanyl czar

El-Sabawi says she views Canada’s appointment of a drug czar as a signal that the government will be focused on supply side, law enforcement initiatives.

Hammond, the University of Waterloo professor, says he hopes efforts to address Canada’s drug problems focus on both the supply and demand sides of the equation.

“Supply-side measures are an important component of substance use policy, but limited in their effectiveness when they are not accompanied by demand-side policies,” he said.

The Canada Border Services Agency and Health Canada redirected Canadian Affairs’ inquiries about the new fentanyl czar role to Public Safety Canada. Public Safety Canada did not respond to multiple requests for comment before publication.

El-Sabawi suggests the entire drug czar role needs rethinking.

“I think the role needs to be re-envisioned as one that is more of a coordinator [across] the administrative branch on addiction and overdose issues … as opposed to what it is now, which is really a mouthpiece — symbolic,” she said.

“Most drug czars don’t get much done.”


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

There’s No Such Thing as a “Safer Supply” of Drugs

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By Adam Zivo

Sweden, the U.K., and Canada all experimented with providing opioids to addicts. The results were disastrous.

[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. We encourage our readers to subscribe to them for high-quality analysis on urban issues]

Last August, Denver’s city council passed a proclamation endorsing radical “harm reduction” strategies to address the drug crisis. Among these was “safer supply,” the idea that the government should give drug users their drug of choice, for free. Safer supply is a popular idea among drug-reform activists. But other countries have already tested this experiment and seen disastrous results, including more addiction, crime, and overdose deaths. It would be foolish to follow their example.

The safer-supply movement maintains that drug-related overdoses, infections, and deaths are driven by the unpredictability of the black market, where drugs are inconsistently dosed and often adulterated with other toxic substances. With ultra-potent opioids like fentanyl, even minor dosing errors can prove fatal. Drug contaminants, which dealers use to provide a stronger high at a lower cost, can be just as deadly and potentially disfiguring.

Because of this, harm-reduction activists sometimes argue that governments should provide a free supply of unadulterated, “safe” drugs to get users to abandon the dangerous street supply. Or they say that such drugs should be sold in a controlled manner, like alcohol or cannabis—an endorsement of partial or total drug legalization.

But “safe” is a relative term: the drugs championed by these activists include pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl, hydromorphone (an opioid as potent as heroin), and prescription meth. Though less risky than their illicit alternatives, these drugs are still profoundly dangerous.

The theory behind safer supply is not entirely unreasonable, but in every country that has tried it, implementation has led to increased suffering and addiction. In Europe, only Sweden and the U.K. have tested safer supply, both in the 1960s. The Swedish model gave more than 100 addicts nearly unlimited access through their doctors to prescriptions for morphine and amphetamines, with no expectations of supervised consumption. Recipients mostly sold their free drugs on the black market, often through a network of “satellite patients” (addicts who purchased prescribed drugs). This led to an explosion of addiction and public disorder.

Most doctors quickly abandoned the experiment, and it was shut down after just two years and several high-profile overdose deaths, including that of a 17-year-old girl. Media coverage portrayed safer supply as a generational medical scandal and noted that the British, after experiencing similar problems, also abandoned their experiment.

While the U.S. has never formally adopted a safer-supply policy, it experienced something functionally similar during the OxyContin crisis of the 2000s. At the time, access to the powerful opioid was virtually unrestricted in many parts of North America. Addicts turned to pharmacies for an easy fix and often sold or traded their extra pills for a quick buck. Unscrupulous “pill mills” handed out prescriptions like candy, flooding communities with OxyContin and similar narcotics. The result was a devastating opioid epidemic—one that rages to this day, at a cumulative cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives. Canada was similarly affected.

The OxyContin crisis explains why many experienced addiction experts were aghast when Canada greatly expanded access to safer supply in 2020, following a four-year pilot project. They worried that the mistakes of the recent past were being made all over again, and that the recently vanquished pill mills had returned under the cloak of “harm reduction.”

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Most Canadian safer-supply prescribers dispense large quantities of hydromorphone with little to no supervised consumption. Patients can receive up to 40 eight-milligram pills per day—despite the fact that just two or three are enough to cause an overdose in someone without opioid tolerance. Some prescribers also provide supplementary fentanyl, oxycodone, or stimulants.

Unfortunately, many safer-supply patients sell or trade a significant portion of these drugs—primarily hydromorphone—in order to purchase more potent illicit substances, such as street fentanyl.

The problems with safer supply entered Canada’s consciousness in mid-2023, through an investigative report I wrote for the National Post. I interviewed 14 addiction physicians from across the country, who testified that safer-supply diversion is ubiquitous; that the street price of hydromorphone collapsed by up to 95 percent in communities where safer supply is available; that youth are consuming and becoming addicted to diverted safer-supply drugs; and that organized crime traffics these drugs.

Facing pushback, I interviewed former drug users, who estimated that roughly 80 percent of the safer-supply drugs flowing through their social circles was getting diverted. I documented dozens of examples of safer-supply trafficking online, representing tens of thousands of pills. I spoke with youth who had developed addictions from diverted safer supply and adults who had purchased thousands of such pills.

After months of public queries, the police department of London, Ontario—where safer supply was first piloted—revealed last summer that annual hydromorphone seizures rose over 3,000 percent between 2019 and 2023. The department later held a press conference warning that gangs clearly traffic safer supply. The police departments of two nearby midsize cities also saw their post-2019 hydromorphone seizures increase more than 1,000 percent.

The Canadian government quietly dropped its support for safer supply last year, cutting funding for many of its pilot programs. The province of British Columbia (the nexus of the harm-reduction movement) finally pulled back support last month, after a leaked presentation confirmed that safer-supply drugs are getting sold internationally and that the government is investigating 60 pharmacies for paying kickbacks to safer-supply patients. For now, all safer-supply drugs dispensed within the province must be consumed under supervision.

Harm-reduction activists have insisted that no hard evidence exists of widespread diversion of safer-supply drugs, but this is only because they refuse to study the issue. Most “studies” supporting safer supply are produced by ideologically driven activist-scholars, who tend to interview a small number of program enrollees. These activists also reject attempts to track diversion as “stigmatizing.”

The experiences of Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Canada offer a clear warning: safer supply is a reliably harmful policy. The outcomes speak for themselves—rising addiction, diversion, and little evidence of long-term benefit.

As the debate unfolds in the United States, policymakers would do well to learn from these failures. Americans should not be made to endure the consequences of a policy already discredited abroad simply because progressive leaders choose to ignore the record. The question now is whether we will repeat others’ mistakes—or chart a more responsible course.

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Should fentanyl dealers face manslaughter charges for fatal overdoses?

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Tyler Ginn prior to his death from a fentanyl overdose in 2021. [Photo credit: Gayle Fowlie]

By Alexandra Keeler

Police are charging more drug dealers with manslaughter in fentanyl overdose deaths. But the shift is not satisfying everyone

Four years ago, Tyler Ginn died of a fentanyl overdose at the age of 18. Tyler’s father found his son unresponsive in the bedroom of their Brooklin, Ont., home.

For Tyler’s mother, Gayle Fowlie, the pain of his loss remains raw.

“He was my kid that rode his bike to the store to buy me a chocolate bar on my birthday, you know?” she told Canadian Affairs in an interview.

Police charged Jacob Norn, the drug dealer who sold Tyler his final, fatal dose, with manslaughter. More than three years after Tyler’s death, Norn was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.

“I don’t think you can grasp how difficult going through a trial is,” Fowlie said. “On TV, it’s a less than an hour process. But the pain of it, and going over every detail and then going over every detail again … it provides details you wish you didn’t know.”

But Fowlie is glad Norn was convicted. If anything, she would have liked him to serve a longer sentence. Lawyers have told her Norn is likely to serve only two to four years of his sentence in prison.

“My son’s never coming back [and] his whole family has a life sentence of missing him the rest of our lives,” she said. “So do I think four years is fair? No.”

Norn’s case reflects a growing trend of drug dealers being charged with manslaughter when their drug sales lead to fatal overdoses.

But this shift has not satisfied everyone. Some would like to see drug dealers face harsher or different penalties.

“If we say that it was 50 per cent Tyler’s fault for buying it and 50 per cent Jacob’s fault for selling it … then I think he should have a half-a-life sentence,” said Fowlie.

Others say the legal system’s focus on prosecuting low-level drug dealers misses the broader issues at play.

“[Police] decided, in the Jacob Norn case, they were going to go one stage back,” said Peter Thorning, who was Norn’s defence lawyer.

“What about the person who gave Jacob that substance? What about the person who supplied the substance to [that person]? There was no investigation into where it came from and who was ultimately responsible for the death of that young man.”

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Manslaughter charge

At least 50,000 Canadians have died from drug overdoses since 2016. Last year, an average of 21 individuals died each day, with fentanyl accounting for nearly 80 per cent of those deaths.

Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, is up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine. A dose as small as a few grains of salt can be lethal.

Given its potency, police and prosecutors have increasingly turned to manslaughter charges when a dealer’s product results in a fatal overdose.

A recent study in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society found that the number of manslaughter charges laid for drug-related deaths in Canada surged from three cases in 2016 to 135 in 2021.

Individuals can be convicted of manslaughter for committing unlawful, reckless or negligent acts that result in death but where there was no intention to kill. Sentences can range from probation (in rare cases) to life.

Murder charges, by contrast, require an intent to kill or cause fatal harm. Drug dealers typically face manslaughter charges in overdose cases, as their intent is to distribute drugs, not to kill those who purchase them.

Joanne Bortoluss, a spokesperson for the Durham Regional Police, which charged Norn, said that each of their investigations follows the same fundamental process.

“Investigators consider the strength of the evidence, the dealer’s level of involvement, and applicable laws when determining whether to pursue charges like manslaughter,” she said.

The Canadian Journal of Law and Society study also found that prosecutions often target low-level dealers, many of whom are drug users themselves and have personal connections to the deceased.

Norn’s case fits this pattern. He struggled with substance abuse, including addiction to fentanyl, Xanax and Percocet. Tyler and Norn were friends, the judge said in the court ruling, although Fowlie disputes this claim.

“[Those words] are repulsive to me,” she said.

The Crown argued Norn demonstrated “a high degree of moral blameworthiness” by warning Ginn of the fentanyl’s potency while still selling it to him. In a call to Ginn, he warned him “not to do a lot of the stuff” because he “didn’t want to be responsible for anything that happened.”

Fowlie’s outrage over Norn’s lenient sentencing is compounded by the fact that Norn was found trafficking fentanyl again after her son’s death.

“So we’ve killed somebody, and we’re still … trafficking? We’re not worried who else we kill?” Fowlie said.

Trafficking

Some legal sources noted that manslaughter charges do not necessarily lead to harsh sentences or deterrence.

“If you look at how diverse and … lenient some sentences are for manslaughter, I don’t think it really pushes things in the direction that [victims’ families] want,” said Kevin Westell, a Vancouver-based trial lawyer and former chair of the Canadian Bar Association.

Westell noted that the term “manslaughter” is misleading. “Manslaughter is a brutal-sounding title, but it encapsulates a very broad span of criminal offences,” he said.

In Westell’s view, consistently charging dealers with drug trafficking could be more effective for deterring the practice.

“What really matters is how long the sentence is, and you’re better off saying, ‘We know fentanyl is dangerous, so we’re setting the sentence quite high,’ rather than making it harder to prove with a manslaughter charge,” he said.

Trafficking is a distinct charge from manslaughter that involves the distribution, sale or delivery of illicit drugs. The sentencing range for fentanyl trafficking is eight to 15 years, Kwame Bonsu, a media relations representative for the Department of Justice, told Canadian Affairs.

“Courts must impose sentences that are proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender,” Bonsu said, referencing a 2021 Supreme Court of Canada decision. Bonsu noted that aggravating factors such as lack of remorse or trafficking large quantities can lead to harsher sentences.

‘Head of the snake’

Some legal experts noted the justice system often fails to target those higher up in the drug supply chain.

“We don’t know how many hands that drug goes through,” said Thorning, the defence lawyer.

“Are the police going to prosecute every single person who provides fentanyl to another person? Jacob [Norn] was himself an addict trafficker — what about the person who supplied the substance to him?”

Thorning also questioned whether government agencies bear some responsibility. “Is some government agency’s failure to investigate how that drug came into the country partly responsible for the young man’s death?”

Westell, who has served as both a Crown prosecutor and criminal defence lawyer, acknowledged the difficulty of targeting higher-level traffickers.

“Cutting off the head of the snake does not align very well with the limitations of the international borders,” he said.

“Yes, there are transnational justice measures, but a lot gets lost, and as soon as you cross an international border of any kind, it becomes incredibly difficult to follow the chain in a linear way.”

Bortoluss, of the Durham police, said even prosecuting what appear to be obvious fentanyl-related deaths — such as Tyler Ginn’s — can be challenging. Witnesses can be reluctant to cooperate, fearing legal consequences. It can also be difficult to identify the source of drugs, as “transactions often involve multiple intermediaries and anonymous online sales.”

Another challenge in deterring fentanyl trafficking is the strong financial incentives of the trade.

“Even if [Norn] serves two to four years for killing somebody, but he could make a hundred thousand off of selling drugs, is it worth it?” Fowlie said.

Thorning agreed that the profit incentive can be incredibly powerful, outweighing the risk of a potential sentence.

“The more risky you make the behaviour, the greater the profit for a person who’s willing to break our laws, and the profit is the thing that generates the conduct,” he said.

A blunt instrument

Legal experts also noted the criminal justice system alone cannot solve the fentanyl crisis.

“Most people who have [lost] a loved one [to drug overdose] want to see a direct consequence to the person that’s responsible,” said Westell. “But I think they would also like to see something on a more macro level that helps eliminate the problem more holistically, and that can’t be [achieved through] crime and punishment alone.”

Thorning agrees.

“These are mental health .. [and] medical issues,” he said. “Criminal law is a blunt instrument [that is] not going to deal with these things effectively.”

Even Fowlie sees the problem as bigger than sentencing. Her son struggled with the stigma associated with therapy and medication, which made it difficult for him to seek help.

“We need to normalize seeing a therapist, like we normalize getting your eyes checked every year,” she said.

“Pot isn’t the gateway drug, trauma is a gateway drug.”


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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