adam zivo: ontario police blame safer supply for skyrocketing seizures of hydromorphone
free, government-supplied opioids being sold by addicts to buy harder drugs, addiction experts say
4 minute read
seized drugs are displayed at a july 15, 2024 police press conference about drug trafficking in london, ont., that focused on the role of diverted safer supply hydromorphone, which addictions experts say is used as a currency to purchase more lethal drugs like fentanyl.
mike hensen / postmedia news
the national post has received data from two more ontario police departments confirming that seizures of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin, have skyrocketed by 1,000 per cent or more since “safer supply” programs became widely available in 2020.
these programs, which are sanctioned by the federal government, distribute free addictive drugs — predominantly eight-mg tablets of hydromorphone — to mitigate the use of riskier street substances. while advocates claim that this “saves lives,” a series of stories in the national post has shown that safer supply clients often divert (sell or trade) their hydromorphone to acquire stronger illicit substances, which floods communities with the drug and fuels new addictions.
harm reduction advocates, including leading figures within the trudeau government, have insisted that reports of rampant safer supply diversion are “disinformation” — but police departments are increasingly contradicting them.
in early june, the police service in london, ont. confirmed to the national post that hydromorphone seizures had exploded by over 3,000 per cent between 2019 and 2023 — from around 1,000 pills per year to 30,000. for context, physicians say just three of these pills can induce an overdose in an opioid-naive user, such as a teenager.
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shortly after the post published this data in early july, london police chief thai truong told a press conference that safer supply diversion is a serious concern that is “fuelling the drug trade” and involving “the highest levels of organized crime.” (london is where safer supply was first piloted in canada and the city remains a national hub for the experiment.)
one month ago, the post contacted the police departments of 10 other municipalities where federally-funded safer supply programs currently operate and requested their 2015 to 2023 hydromorphone seizure data. some did not reply, and not all those that did reply were helpful. many departments refused to provide interviews with their leadership and declined to gather or release seizure data without a formal freedom of information request.
however, the waterloo regional police service and niagara regional police service were co-operative and readily provided their data, which showed the same disturbing trend observed in london. between 2019 and 2023, hydromorphone seizures exploded by 1,090 per cent in the waterloo region and 1,577 per cent in the niagara region.
in waterloo, only 508 hydromorphone pills were seized in 2019, but that number jumped to 910 pills — a 79 per cent increase — the following year, after safer supply became widely available. following a small rise in 2021, seizures quintupled to 5,146 pills in 2022 and then again rose slightly to 5,538 pills in 2023.
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in niagara, only 291 hydromorphone pills were seized in 2019. that number more than tripled in 2020 — to 904 pills — and skyrocketed each year afterwards, reaching 4,590 pills in 2023.
while these numbers are extraordinary, addiction experts have cautioned that they represent only a sliver of what is actually trafficked on the black market. these seizures were also dwarfed by those in london — where, on a per capita basis, police seized roughly 700 per cent more hydromorphone last year than their waterloo or niagara counterparts.
interestingly, hydromorphone seizures were trending downwards in the mid-to-late 2010s — a development that todd waselovich, deputy chief of the niagara regional police, attributed to the rapid popularization of fentanyl during these years. pharmaceutical opioids like hydromorphone may be as powerful as heroin, but their potency is still eclipsed by fentanyl — so pharmaceuticals were “basically wiped out of the illicit market here in niagara,” he said.
“now we’re seeing them coming back. well, what’s changed? right? … they’re coming from somewhere,” said waselovich. “clearly the numbers are going up and the safer supply is ending up in police investigations — clearly they’re not being used the way they’re supposed to be used.”
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while the deputy chief believes that safer supply makes sense in theory, he said the skyrocketing hydromorphone seizures are “obviously concerning” and mused: “is this posing a bigger risk, or is it still a benefit so that we continue doing this?” he later noted that the “biggest thing” that he sees missing in ontario is adequate funding for treatment centres, which has led to long, potentially fatal, wait times for drug users who want help quitting.
in an emailed statement, the waterloo police wrote that they were also “concerned about the increase in seized hydromorphone in our community,” and, though they have been “monitoring the steady increase” for several years, hydromorphone is “often found in unmarked containers, making it difficult to determine if it was diverted from safer supply or stolen from a pharmacy and/or other source.”
some harm reduction activists claim that flooding communities with diverted pharmaceutical opioids is good, as this could theoretically push out riskier, illicitly-manufactured substances. waselovich disagreed, though, and said that he is “absolutely, 100 per cent” certain that such diversion is simply expanding the total drug supply and “certainly not replacing all the illicit fentanyl powders.”
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unlike in london, the niagara police haven’t found evidence implicating organized crime in safer supply diversion, but the deputy chief wouldn’t rule out the possibility: “if there’s a way to exploit it, they will.”
though other police departments have told me that hydromorphone seizure data is onerous to gather, waselovich said that pulling this information together “wasn’t that difficult” and had amounted to “probably one day of turnaround notifying our officers that we needed this.” he clarified, however, that other police departments may have different internal processes.
national post
adam zivo is executive director of the centre for responsible drug policy.
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