Opioid Prohibition on First Nation Territory

"[There is no] hate [for those involved in drug offences; they are not considered] bad people."

"We are now seeing much more dangerous substances, like meth and fentanyl, creeping into our region..." 

"We cannot afford to ignore the signs [in considering the safety of the community]."

Chief and Council, Buffalo River Dene Nation, Saskatchewan 

 

"In Manitoba and across Canada, fentanyl poisonings are taking lives daily."

"Our front-line workers and families are doing all they can, but support from federal and provincial governments remains fragmented, underfunded and reactive."

Chief Angela Levasseur, Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation 

 

"Families are torn apart, two children are left without parents, and our social fabric is broken." 

"The scale of this crisis demands immediate, co-ordinated federal action."

"Piecemeal funding and short term pilots are not enough. The federal government has both fiduciary and treaty obligations to act."

Cold Lake First Nations Chief Kelsey Jacko 

Delegates vote electronically on resolutions at the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Annual General Assembly in Winnipeg on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods

 

Friday saw a proposed law that First Nations chiefs voted unanimously to support while calling on the federal government to begin enforcing a crackdown on drug dealers selling illegitimate drugs in their communities that claim the lives of users. The Assembly of First Nations was also called upon to declare a state of emergency among all First Nations, and to appeal to the federal government for greater support for treatment and prevention. The law, as proposed, would see sentences for drug traffickers to a 15-year minimum where death occurs from tainted drugs.

 

Law enforcement, furthermore would be given authority to access the cellphones of victims in search of those traffickers responsible for the proliferation of the drugs. The resolution appealed to the Assembly of First Nations to advocate for federal resources required to address root causes of drug use, focusing on prevention, intervention and rehabilitation. The proposal called for "legal reforms that reflect the true scale and human impact of the fentanyl crisis, and that prioritize the protection of life over the criminal impunity currently enabling  traffickers and dealers."

 

Countrywide, Canada's First Nations have become actively involved in banishing drug dealers from their communities, their effort to curb the skyrocketing rate of drug overdoses, in sharp contrast to government strategies which prioritize harm reduction and drug trafficking-lenient treatment. September 3 saw the Ojibway community of Netmizaaggamig Nishnaabeg in Ontario authorize the Anishinabek Police Service to treat unauthorized visitors as trespassers. 

 

 

"Unfortunately, there's people coming into the community with these drugs that are taking advantage of our people", stated deputy chief Thurston Kwissiw. Saskatchewan's Buffalo River Dene Nation last month announced it planned to begin evicting its own members from reserve housing who are involved in drug activities. Kwakiutl First Nation on Vancouver Island looked at available options for the eviction of members accused of drug dealing. Hereditary chief David Knox informed local media "we're tired of watching our loved ones get killed from these toxic drugs". 

 

The family of an alleged drug trafficker and accused murderer's family on Haida Gwaii saw their home demolished and were forced to leave the islands. Pickets followed the family to the mainland, intercepting them at bus stops to ensure they moved on. Multiple Indigenous communities in the North enforce blanket bans on alcohol, assisted by the RCMP. In the northern Alberta community of Fox Lake, a bootlegger was recently detained while attempting to smuggle in 124 bottles of illicit vodka.

 

Opioid Addiction – image: depositphotos.com

 

Fatal overdoses among Indigenous people in British Columbia is seven times greater than the average. Overdose deaths in Alberta have been responsible for a sharp drop in Indigenous life expectancy. The average First Nations person in Alberta lives to 62.8 years, down in a decades' time from a 2013 peak of 72.4, much less than the current non-Indigenous life expectancy in Canada of 81.8 years. 

 

It has long been acknowledged by government health authorities that Indigenous communities are affected more dramatically by illicit drugs than non-Indigenous communities. Yet, official strategies have tended to sidestep the issue of drug trafficking interdiction. Published in 2023, the official Canadian Drugs and Substance Strategy, posits that high Indigenous drug use is attributable to "historial and intergenerational trauma, including the impact of colonization".

 

The self-flagellating federal government gave expression to then-attorney general David Lametti's statement that "We hare repealed the mandatory minimum penalties that have most contributed to the over-incarceration of Indigenous people, Black persons and racialized Canadians", in explaining the 2022 passage of Bill C-5, the Liberal legislative gift influenced by Critical Race Theory to non-punishable minority groups held to be disadvantaged and not responsible for their misdemeanors, thus removing mandatory minimum penalties for drug trafficking offences.

 

Finally, the Assembly of First Nations is signalling that this approach has not worked, and will not work, to address these habitual problems of sociopathy prevalent in specific groups. The 1,500-member Mississauga First Nation last October scored a precedent-setting legal victory with an Ontario court upholding their trespassing order against an accused drug dealer who  continually frequented the community. In the process the Mississauga leaders emphasized their long struggle to have police enforce their community codes. 

 

A sign distributed around the Pic Mobert First Nation announcing the enforcement of a new rule intended to evict and exile drug traffickers. Photo by Facebook.com/Pic Mobert First Nation

 

Canada's Liberal Government, True to Form

"[It was] irresponsible and unacceptable [that Heritage Canada] conducted no research or background checks before they distributed this money]."

"If the government cannot conduct a simple background check on the institutions they distribute money to, they need to reconsider their use of grants and contributions."

"According to Heritage Canada’s own Departmental Reports, in 2020-21 they employed 194 full-time employees and spent $134,607,209 to promote diversity and inclusion. How is it possible with those resources that they did not see fit to evaluate an organization before deciding to grant it $133,000?"

Shadow Minister for Canadian Heritage, MP John Nater

 

"Regardless of the hate and propaganda he promotes, for years [Marouf] was able to sell himself to the government as a legitimate enterprise, regardless of how absolutely offensive his communications were. This is problematic."

"It is profoundly troubling that this individual was supported and enabled in his hate speech, and the government needs to overhaul whatever problem is in these programs."

Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, director of policy, Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies 

Laith Marouf   Photo by Peter McCabe/The Gazette

The man at the centre of this controversy in 2022, Laith Marouf, is a flaming antisemite and all-'round racist. He was the top consultant for the Community Media Advocacy Center (CMAC); in fact its founder and only 'employee'. He was given to referring to Jews as 'bags of human feces' deserving of a 'bullet to the head'. He posted regularly on social media sites such as X, and the quality and quantity of those posts were readily available for viewing in a strictly cursory, casual search. Yet, even though a Liberal MP had flagged the content of these posts to then-Minister of Canadian Heritage Ahmed Hussen, they were dismissed. 

The Community Media Advocacy Center in the six years prior to and including the 2022 revelations, received contracts from the federal government valued at $500 million representing cost support, research and advocacy (for equity and diversity programs) from the Canadian federal broadcasting agency. When the scandal of the absurdity and outrage of the federal government having hired a racist consultant to operate training sessions in anti-racism for government employees led to the contract's withdrawal and attempts to recover the funding given the CMAC, little was heard of this man and his agency again.

Now it has been revealed that he was recently arrested, then released by Lebanon's Military Intelligence Directorate, in an area adjacent to the border with Israel. The restricted area that this took place in was a border town in Lebanon, called Mais al-Jabal. Marouf had evidently failed to present the required media credentials. Held incommunicado under "extensive interrogation" at Lebanon's Defense Ministry's headquarters just outside Beirut, he was released on Tuesday, evidently without charges or conditions. 

 

This man, who was known to refer to Quebecers as 'frogs', Black people as slaves, and characterizing Israelis as 'loud-mouthed bags of human feces, aka the Jewish White Supremacists' who would one day be forced to 'go back to where they came from' had been suspended from X for hateful commentary and advocating violence. He had regularly appeared as a pundit for Iran's Press TV and the Kremlin's Sputnik propaganda platform as a supporter of the Assad regime in Syria. He began his career, in violent 'anti-Zionist' protests at Concordia University decades earlier as the son of a Syrian diplomat in Montreal. 

 

After Justin Trudeau became prime minister in 2015, Marouf's Community Media Advocacy Centre collected some $517,480 in Broadcast Participation Fund grants. Once the uproar over his having been hired as an expert anti-racist, prepared to school federal civil servants in equity and diversity had subsided from the public eye and ear, Heritage Canada which had hired him, saw their officials undergoing workshops on identifying antisemitism, with instructions on identifying racists and antisemites among grant applicants.

 

Marouf had busied himself with pro-Hezbollah 'Free Palestine Television' in Beirut, insisting his FPTV is "unaffiliated with any political party or groups", while relying heavily on interviews with fellow 'anti-Zionists', leading to sympathetic coverage of the problems facing Hezbollah after it decided to join Hamas in its conflict with the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza, post-7 October 2023. Combat videos featuring Hamas, the Mujahideen Brigades and the Al-Qassam (IRGC) Brigades figured large in Marouf's FPTV series.

 

Mais al-Jabal, the border town where Marouf was picked up on Sunday, was a Hezbollah stronghold. The IDF last October destroyed lookout posts and weapons caches and tunnels in the town, mere metres from the Israeli border. On Marouf's arrival in Mais al-Jabal, he was detained at a checkpoint, and informed he lacked authorization to be in the area. Taken to a detention centre, his driver, Hadi Hoteit, a FPTV producer and correspondent for Tehran's Press TV, was released. 

 

View overlooking the Hula Valley and the town of Kiryat Shmona in northern Israel.  Alexey Protasov/stock.adobe.com

 

About 20 kilometres from Israel's northernmost city Kiryat Shmona, Mais al-Jabal is in a strategic location, one that Hezbollah used to rain rockets down over the Golan Heights to Jewish communities below. About 22,000 Israelis lived in Kiryat Shmonia before Hezbollah joined Hamas's war on Israel in October 2023. At least fifty percent of the city's buildings had been destroyed by Hezbollah rockets, its population evacuated to temporary safety in central Israel. 

 

Israeli reserve soldiers take part in a military drill in the Golan Heights, northern Israel, May 8, 2024

(photo credit: AYAL MARGOLIN/FLASH90)

 

"[FPTV launched] with the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Flood — the name Hamas and other Palestinian groups have given to the Oct. 7 massacre. The online station is based out of Lebanon, staffed primarily by students, professors and community members."

"FPTV’s goal is to support the resistance from a media standpoint and to incite free peoples to move and fight Zionism and imperialism wherever they exist."

"Knowing that there is a huge gap left in news programming in English that is supportive of resistance and the right to liberation … we decided to bring together our communities here to start a project, a community television station."

FPTV Website 

 

"The Middle East Forum, an American conservative think tank, published a report that FPTV had links to the Lebanon-based group Al-Tajammu. According to Michael Barak, a researcher at the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at Israel’s Reichmann University, Al-Tajammu is “an international pro-Iranian platform to leverage the resistance axis against the U.S., Israel and their allies”."

"Marouf described the attacks on Al-Tajammu as “frivolous” and accused the Middle East Forum of being a “racist organization”."

National Post 

 

Desperate Moves to Save Lives Hovering on Extinction

"Despite throwing all this at it, we still are seeing terrible increases in drug toxicity and terrible loss of life."

"We hear from people on the ground that stigma and shame is making people hide their drug use."

"I certainly hope that it's the first thing that is on Minister Bennett's desk. This is something that could inform approaches in the rest of the country."

"And we've got a lot of support here in British Columbia to move quickly and the public emergency demands that we move urgently."

"Criminalizing it and driving it into the shadows has not worked; it has not helped."

Sheila Malcolmson, Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, British Columbia

"As the opioid and overdose crisis continues to worsen, we must take every measure possible to reduce harms and save lives."

"We recognize the different approaches cities, provinces, and other organizations are taking and are supportive of their work."

"We know there is more to do and our government will remain engaged with them to move these health-based approaches forward."

Mental Health and Addictions Canada statement 

A rose placed at the intersection of East Hastings and Main streets in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver on Feb. 11, in memory of those lost to the opioid crisis. (Ben Nelms/CBC)

 

British Columbia has been the first province in Canada to open controversial harm-reduction clinics and to experiment novel new stances in the hope that the humanitarian impulse to help the addicted move away from their drug dependency, and in worst-case scenarios where diehard drug abusers cannot be convinced to take steps to turn themselves away from drugs, helping them to inject safely with required attention to the vital importance of hygiene in this time of COVID-19, have found themselves facing a brick wall of failure.

Despite all the best efforts of health care institutions, humanitarian aid and government intervention, the rate of overdose deaths simply keeps rising. Now, the provincial government has approached the federal government with a request for exemption for people in possession of small amounts of heroin, cocaine and other illicit drugs, including fentanyl. The request is that the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act be suspended at this historical time of COVID intersecting with drug overdose increases.

To allow people possession of up to 4.5 grams or less of heroin, fentanyl, crack or powder cocaine and methamphetamine, lifting the fear of criminal charges and seizure of the drugs by police. Such an exemption to be based on a like principle permitting supervised injection sites to operate within the law, to apply province-wide. There are observers who question whether decriminalization would succeed in reducing deaths by overdose, citing the reality that there have been such policies in place in B.C. for years, none of which have succeeded in reducing opioid deaths.

During the pandemic, overdose deaths have actually soared. Furthermore, the province's solicitor-general had given instruction to provincial police forces to no longer make arrests for simple possession, long before the arrival of the pandemic. Over a year ago in another effort to address ways of reducing the constraints, the Public Prosecution Service of Canada had directed prosecutors that the most serious drug crimes be focused on; "and to otherwise pursue suitable alternative measures and diversion from the criminal justice system for simple possession cases".

Despite all of these moves 1,204 people died from drug overdose; 184 of them in July alone,according to the B.C. Coroners Service. A new record awaits of over 2,000 deaths in the current year, over five times the number of fatal overdoses that occurred ten years earlier. Such overdose deaths now exceed deaths linked to suicide, homicide and car accidents in total; Fentanyl is implicated in 86 percent of these overdose deaths.

 

Over 100 treatment beds have been opened, with another 200 in the planning stages, by the B.C. government. Safe supply programs have been created, allowing doctors and nurses to prescribe opioids (including fentanyl patches), alcohol, stimulants and benzodiazepines in an effort to persuade users to avoid street drugs laced with fentanyl.  

These are clearly acts of desperation in desperate times. The best of intentions appear to fuel the problem rather than dampen the situation. Making drugs more readily available in sterile situations  to avoid COVID infections may diminish the spread of the virus, but it also has the effect of normalizing drug addiction since the addicted, while being referred to drug-reduction programs also have the option of refusing them, their needs being met in the short-term. The programs may not expire, but the addicted do.

It is expected that others will follow British Columbia's example. It's the compassionate way to address the human obligation to give aid and support to others in need. And the demographic that fits into the category of desperate addictions is steadily growing. Even as their numbers reduce through untimely deaths new recruits to the hopeless impulsion of drug misuse are multiplying, exacerbating a situation already past dire. 

The City of Toronto is witnessing the steady growth of overdose deaths as are many other municipalities, all of which feel compelled to face the growing problem not with punishment of people whose lives have been turned toward a ritual revolving around rewarding drug dealers with the offshoot problem of petty crime to feed the need of a wasted life. City councils, in desperation, turn to calling for exemptions or broader access to a safe supply of illicit drugs.

People hold signs during a memorial march to remember victims of overdose deaths in Vancouver  Globe & Mail