Designed to Trap, Disabling Society's Vulnerable

"When I started my career, heroin was the opioid of choice -- the king of opioids."

"But I've seen a complete shift, to the point where I don't even see heroin anymore."

"It's all fentanyl, all the time."

Hamilton Police Det. Matt Dugdale 

"There's traffic going north to south and south to north and we don't want that."

"There's not a lot of intel to indicate that the substance is actually going down south."

"Even small amounts that are going south is too much; one single dose can kill someone." 

RCMP Commissioner Michael Duheme 

"Without the prescription opioid crisis and the excessive, long-term prescribing, without creating this demand in the population and all these problematic users ... we wouldn't have the fentanyl death crisis we've had over the last ten years."

"The overdoses go up, the deaths go up and we don't know what to do."

Benedikt Fischer, senior researcher, Simon Fraser University 

"People didn't know they were being switched over to fentanyl. [But] once  people became addicted to fentanyl, there was no turning back."

"Their brain  really is hijacked, their reward pathways are  hijacked."

"You have to look at the globe and ask why is it that fentanyl really came only to North America in as substantial a way as it did. [Why fentanyl and why was China the chief supplier? Leaving suspicions of] geographical considerations."

Dr. Alexander Caudarella, addiction-treatment specialist, Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse and Addiction

A photo submitted by the RCMP shows a clandestine drug lab where Mounties say a large quantity of fentanyl was discovered in Mission, B.C. in November 2023. (submitted by Mission RCMP

Opioids were responsible for the deaths of 8,500 Canadians back in 2023, some 23 deaths daily, though numbers have descended slightly since. There are no areas that are immune: cities, towns, rural areas, and the Far North. Invented in 1960 by Belgian Paul Janssen as a type of anaesthetic considered safer than natural opioids, its molecular structure saw it cross the blood-brain barrier more efficiently than morphine-based drugs in swifter, more potent action.

 

Fentanyl is  up to 100 times more powerful than morphine; it is a central nervous system depressant which taken in excess can cause breathing to gradually stop. The heart deprived of oxygen will stop beating, leading to death. Sold as a pain treatment, doctors in Canada who withheld prescribing opioids as pain relief to avoid opium addiction viewed a new, slow-release opioid called OxyContin more favourably. When a cheaper, lab-produced alternative arrived, a more relaxed attitude prevailed and prescriptions soared.

 

Since 2016, opioid addiction and overdoses have taken the lives of 50,000 Canadians. A once-obscure prescription pain drug has caused havoc across North America in an era of liberal prescribing of morphine-related drugs and black-market fentanyl. Suspicions abound over China's role as chief exporter of the finished drug and its chemical antecedents. Canada is second to the U.S. in opioid prescription drugs consumption, dispensing more of the drugs per capita than any other country globally.

 

The realization finally set in that the prescribing of opioids had become too liberal, with governments and medical regulators prompted to take action through opioid monitoring programs, provincial drug plans to stop covering OxyContin and new generic versions. Consumption of legal opioids in Canada dropped by 50 percent from 2015 to 2021. And then fentanyl arrived, streaming into the country from producers in China. A drug so potent it allowed traffickers and smugglers an advantage with small quantities producing instant highs.

 

Health Canada says it can only take a few grains of fentanyl to kill someone. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

 

Anyone unaccustomed to opioids can die of just two milligrams, which meant that lucrative shipments could be more easily hidden. The Rand Drug Policy Research Centre estimates the annual underground supply of fentanyl weights less than 10 tons. "That literally means that any one of the over five million trucks that cross the U.S.-Mexico border each year could hold all the illegal fentanyl our nation consumes", stated Stanford professor Keith Humprheys. 

 

Last spring a U.S. congressional committee reported that Beijing provided tax rebates to companies exporting fentanyl copycat drugs and precursor chemicals, while not countenancing their being sold in China. "When it gets out into the public, you have a situation where you have a tremendous amount of resources to police it, stop its spread, try to deal with the health crisis. That plays into any adversary's hands", explained Dennis Molinaro, a former national security analyst.

 

Finally, China agreed under pressure from the United States, to classify finished fentanyl as a "listed drug", requiring a license to export it. Which led to a dwindling of the export of the finished drug, but chemical companies in China could still sell the chemical component precursors used to synthesize the drug. Now, laboratories have been established in rural out-of-the-way communities across the country in Canada where the manufacture of the completed drug is clandestinely and routinely carried on.

 

Canadian criminals began launching their own fentanyl in compounds concealed within rural landscapes. Other synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine and ecstasy are not ignored; labs turn them out along with the deadly opioid, fentanyl. A recent report by the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, revealed that 235 organized crime groups in Canada are involved in producing or distributing fentanyl. Clandestine laboratory enforcement and response units with the RCMP are comprised of specially trained teams to hunt down, and dismantle the illicit facilities.