(UPDATE: March 8 @ 10:30 am): Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has requested an emergency meeting with BC ministers to discuss the possibility that safer supply drugs could be ending up in Alberta.
Her intervention comes after Prince George RCMP said this week that an "alarming trend" has emerged of prescribed opiods being obtained by organized criminals and sold outside of BC.
"Alberta has been warning for years that diversion of high-potency opioids from these programs could be diverted and trafficked across Canada, potentially causing irreparable harm and death in communities across the country," she said this morning in a statement.
She said the evidence acquired in Prince George and other BC communities "clearly show[s] organized crime is trafficking and profiting from diverted 'safe supply' drugs."
Smith added that Alberta has made the safer supply model "illegal to prevent this very thing from happening."
"With the serious concern of diversion becoming evident and the reality that these drugs may be ending up for resale in Alberta, I have asked Deputy Premier and Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services Mike Ellis, and Minister of Mental Health and Addiction Dan Williams, to request an emergency meeting with their counterparts in British Columbia to stop the flow of these high-potency opioids to Alberta."
NowMedia has requested comment from the BC goverment.
(Original story: March 8 @ 6:50 am): Mounties in Prince George have warned of an “alarming trend” of gangsters getting hold of prescribed drugs and selling them outside of the province.
The RCMP in the city said it had seized more than 10,000 pills – containing morphine, hydromorphone, codeine and other drugs – in two operations over the last three months.
Hydromorphone and morphine are both part of BC’s so-called “safer supply” program, in which people who are addicted to street drugs are prescribed what health officials say are safer alternatives.
BC is the first jurisdiction in Canada to offer such a program provincewide. It began in March 2020.
According to the government, 4,212 people were given opioids under the program in December 2023. It said 658 clinicians were involved in prescribing the drugs.
But many individuals and groups have warned the drugs are being sold or exchanged because users prefer harder drugs like fentanyl.
Health officials call this practice “diversion.”
“We have noted an alarming trend over the last year in the amount prescription drugs located during drug trafficking investigations, noting they are being used as a form of currency to purchase more potent, illicit street drugs,” Cpl. Jennifer Cooper from Prince George RCMP explained in a news release.
“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."
She said this criminal activity “significantly increases the profits” obtained by gangsters.
Last month, Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said in a review that BC should consider prescribing smokable fentanyl instead of opioid pills, which many drug users consider unsatisfactory.
"We need to replace it with the compassion and understanding that I know we have in this province," she said at a news conference to promote the report’s publication.
The BC Centre for Disease Control’s Dr. Alexis Crabtree, meanwhile, said at the same conference that diversion of prescribed drugs was an “unintended consequence” of the program.
The report claimed concerns about diversion should be viewed as a failure to meet the needs of drug users.
It also acknowledged that the concept of safe supply is not “fully evidence-based.”
Earlier this week, police on Vancouver Island said they'd seized more than 3,500 hydromorphone pills that appeared to have been obtained through the safer supply program.
There were more than 2,500 drug overdose deaths in BC in 2023, the worst year in the history of the crisis.
