Landrew
Bluelighter
DUSTIN GODFREY.
MAR 11, 2024
Here’s a BIG SCOOP: I read a press release.
Actually, I read two.
In the last couple weeks, two BC RCMP detachments put out news releases about drug busts in their respective jurisdictions.
First, Campbell River RCMP put out a news release, on Feb. 28, declaring a “sizeable seizure of fentanyl.” Further into the release, police claimed the seizure also included 3,500 hydromorphone pills, also known as dilaudid.
Prince George RCMP followed suit on Mar. 7, announcing “substantial seizures of prescriptions and illicit drugs.” Of those, one allegedly included 10,000 pills, including gabapentin, hydromorphone, codeine and dextroamphetamine (also known as dexedrine); and a second involved “thousands more prescription pills,” including oxycodone, morphine and hydromorphone.
Targeting safe supply
The news releases had their sights set in particular on safe supply.“Organized crime groups are actively involved in the redistribution of safe supply and prescription drugs, some of which are then moved out of British Columbia and resold,” said the Prince George RCMP news release, in a quote attributed to cpl. Jennifer Cooper, media relations officer.
The Campbell River RCMP release was less pointed, but noted: “Evidence was located during the search suggesting that these dilaudid pills had been diverted from safe supply prescriptions.”
Neither press release indicates what evidence suggested the prescription pills came from safe supply.
A CTV report on the Campbell River news release said the outlet asked police for more information about the evidence indicating the pills came from safe supply, and for an estimate on how many prescriptions were involved, but said it didn’t receive a response.
How much safe supply is in the supply?
And it doesn’t exactly pass the smell test.If the evidence is simply that they came in prescription bottles, I have news for them: prescription hydromorphone has been diverted to the streets since long before it became prevalent as a safe supply option. In 2018/19, there were more than 80,000 people receiving prescriptions for the drug, according to that fiscal year’s British Columbia Controlled Prescription Drug Atlas. (There isn’t a more recent equivalent report published online.)
Safe supply opioid medications, including hydromorphone, declined from just over 5,000 in March last year to just over 4,300 in September, according to Corey Ranger, president of the Harm Reduction Nurses Association, who has been tracking the figures as they are released by the province. According to a Prince George Citizen report on the police news release there, that figure had dropped even further to 4,212.
Given that, it beggars belief that nearly that many pills from safe supply are being found in multiple individual drug busts in different areas of the province.
As harm reduction worker Juls Budau, who used to work in Prince George, noted in a later CBC article, “it’s fuelling a misinformation campaign.”
"These pills have been trafficked for decades. The fact that they're calling them safe supply pills is a bit troubling,” she told the CBC, adding that the seizures are “just used to diminish a program that we all said isn't enough from the beginning.”
read more: https://www.thebind.ca/p/big-scoop-a-press-release
