The downtown Eastside Vancouver is third world. We live in a open prison yard. Why should my kids have to live in that risk and that danger? Other citizens have rights as well. You have a right not to inhale second hand crystal meth smoke. It's really a case of the inmates running the asylum.
What is happening to Canada, a country once considered immune from the most appalling displays of homelessness and chaos has become an epicenter for shocking, violent, and at times, random attacks as drug use has burst into the open and a devastating battle with addiction has literally left tens of thousands of Canadians dead. But what is the solution? Do we simply need a so-called safe supply of toxic drugs? Should more provinces follow the lead of BC and decriminalize fentanyl meth and cocaine? Or is it time to put victims first, crack down on crime and get addicts, the help and treatment they so desperately need? I hate the word safe supply because you would probably think it was safe to take. And that's the problem is that it's not safe. Most people who are using this have never tried drugs before this. Like, it's definitely creating a lot more addicts than there was before. What we're doing now is almost capital punishment in our streets by neglect. This is like the industrialization of addiction. It's as scary as it gets. My name is Aaron Gunn and this is Politics Explained.
We begin with breaking news tonight. Police say a man stabbed and assaulted at least four people all in a matter of minutes and they are not sure of the motive. Video of the incident shows the woman pushed from the subway platform onto the tracks. Four victims retreated by paramedics after a woman allegedly assaulted them with a bottle. Police say the victim was hit in the head with a large pole while walking to class. New details tonight about that stabbing attack that left one woman dead in another injured. Police now say this was a random act.
Increase 32% a reality that has left many Canadians anxious and concerned. According to a recent poll, 64% of Canadians feel crime and violence have been getting worse. While in Vancouver, 40% of residents now report living in fear for their safety on a daily basis. And it's not hard to see why. A woman on a mobility scooter brazenly attacked bus and Skytrain passengers stabbed and throat slit with a knife. And in March 2023, the shocking, random and graphic murder of a father in front of his wife and young daughter in broad daylight outside of Starbucks on Granville Street. All part of a terrifying trend known as stranger attacks, which have increased 35% in Vancouver last year alone.
But these shocking, violent and random attacks are no longer exclusive to Vancouver. Toronto police say 16-year-old Gabrielle Magalouche was sitting on a bench at this Toronto subway station Saturday evening when a man approached him unprovoked. Magalouche was stabbed. He was rushed to hospital but died not long after. He didn't die from being sick or anything. He was stabbed in here and he bled out.
A day after the moving memorial to Gabrielle's life, I visited the scene of his murder to talk to Toronto residents, still reeling from the attack. You know, it's very unsafe. I've been here, I've been here for many years, and every, that is the worst year I see this, so that is the worst year. And when you see something like that, you feel it's shocking because you never know what's coming. The randomness of it as well is just really disturbing. I don't know, as a young woman, especially, it's like really scary. It's really upsetting because we were not that much older than him. One is far more wary on the lookout. Very sad, you have 16-years-old for God's sake.
No child should die like that. No adult should die like that. This is sheer sloppiness from the government. Yeah, it goes without saying that everybody should feel safe and not have to, you know, get on the subway platform without fear of getting stabbed. Like, I feel like that's the bare minimum. But the murder of Gabrielle Megalese was hardly an isolated incident on the TTC. Canada's largest transit system has been rocked by shocking violent attacks over the past year from random shootings to a woman literally set on fire.
I sat down with the former police chief of Toronto, Mark Saunders, to discuss how violence on the TTC and in Toronto more broadly has begun to spiral out of control.
我与多伦多前警察局长马克·桑德斯坐下来讨论在多伦多地铁和城市中,暴力事件开始失控的原因。
You were the chief of police. How does that make you feel to see what's kind of happened to your city? It seems like people are scared to ride the transit system.
你曾是警察局长。看到你的城市发生这样的事情,你感觉如何?似乎人们害怕乘坐公共交通系统。
Yeah, the transit system is the lifeblood for so many people. And the fact that they are scared, it's just not good. You know, you're talking about a ridership that at one point in time is 1.2 million and it's now 860 something. It is a concern. It's a starting point of other things. And whatever you do, don't normalize. Don't normalize disorder. Don't normalize crime. Because if you do, then it moves exponentially. And, you know, we're watching how Toronto is moving that way. And each attack leaves not only a victim, but cascading trauma and pain that can level communities, bystanders, and families most of all.
Woke up in the morning and I had a Facebook message from my son, Doug's partner. She wanted me to call her. So I phoned her and she told me that there had been a random stabbing in Chilok the night before. And then she told me that he didn't make it. I got it through my head and, you know, shortly after hung up the phone and I had to say to my husband probably the worst thing he's ever had to hear in his whole life that his son had been murdered.
I guess it started with an altercation with this other man, Steve. And he ended up murdered and then a girl is on the ground with a stab wound and my son steps up to help. Now, there's a couple of kind of shocking revelations reading about this particular case. But the one that still I come back to over and over again was the fact that this individual with a long criminal history.
When I learned that this person had over 50 convictions, some of them with a knife in his past. He'd been labeled a sexual offender, some of them with younger girls. When you have that many convictions, I don't understand how our justice system can allow him to be out walking the streets. My son should never have been murdered. Instead of being behind bars for his over 50 criminal convictions, Kirkland Russell was free to roam our streets. And because of that, Doug Pruso was murdered.
Even more shockingly, for the crime of stabbing Pruso, 14 times with the knife and killing him while screaming out why won't you effing die? Russell received a sentence of only eight years. Do you think eight years in prison is justice for taking the life of your son?
I'm pretty sure everybody knows my answer. Um, absolutely not. I mean, nothing will bring my son back, but eight years certainly doesn't, uh, help, help, uh, count for it at all. Um, it's almost a slap in the face. Eight years. It is, it is a slap in the face to my son, trying to help someone out. Done absolutely nothing wrong. And then what shocked us further was that you actually get statutory release in two after two thirds of your sentence. So we were shocked once again. So he was let out in, uh, in November on parole and, um, sent to a halfway house. But when someone's had this many convictions and they keep progressively getting more violent, more violent, more dangerous, when he's out on our streets, someone else is going to get hurt or murdered.
This disturbing trend of a repeat violent offender being released to our streets is unfortunately not an isolated incident. In fact, Jordan O'Brien-Tubern, the man accused of killing 16 year old Gabrielle Megalase, had already racked up dozens of criminal convictions himself, including for stabbing someone else just one year earlier and was on probation at the time of the attack. Instead of being behind bars, he too was set free. And because of that, Gabrielle is dead.
But just how common is it for our justice system to release dangerous repeat offenders like Kirkland Russell and Jordan O'Brien-Tubern? And as Canada's justice system become little more than a revolving door.
To find out, I traveled to Ottawa to meet with Larry Brock, a former crown attorney from Brantford, Ontario, who now represents his riding as its member of Parliament. I was just seeing more and more familiar faces in the criminal justice system being largely responsible for the, uh, the most significant proportion of serious criminal violence in our community. A lot of stavings, a lot of shootings and frustrating aspect was they were continually being released.
These so-called prolific offenders who are consistently arrested and then released are responsible for a majority of the crime across the country. The problem has gotten so bad in British Columbia that the mayors of the 13 largest municipalities wrote to then Attorney General now Premier David Eby, literally begging the government to do something. They shared data that showed just 207 of the most prolific offenders in the province were responsible for more than 11,000 negative interactions with police in the last year alone.
A catalyst for surging crime and violence that has not been limited to the large metropolitan cities like Vancouver, but has also affected much smaller municipalities, including Victoria, Kelowna and the once peaceful Vancouver Island city of Nanaimo. Recent numbers show severe crime up 44% here in Nanaimo.
I don't feel safe. Right. So first time I, you know, I carry a knife now. I will pull this and it's an alarm for me to feel safe. I don't feel safe in my neighborhood. This is Kevin Shaw, an outspoken and long-time Nanaimo resident who's fed up with the skyrocketing crime and violence plaguing his hometown. It's gone from where we just had people freaking out yelling and screaming to needles, to knives being used to machetes.
A man who had been stabbed staggered into the mall, bystanders rushed to help trying to stop the bleeding and did not survive. To axes being used just a few weeks ago and now several shootings in just the last month. Residents rallied in Nanaimo Thursday following a brazen shooting over the weekend. It just exploded. A man came out of nowhere grabbing her by the throat and when she screamed for him to get off of her, he proceeded to grab her breasts. Aidan ties up here. You don't know who this guy is at this point. It's not a good guy. Not a clue.
As an adult, Ty has been criminally convicted more than 110 times. They picked up a paving stone and I had an next scene. Now he threw it up my wife and he hit my wife right here while she was 34 weeks pregnant. We've had a bow and arrow that had a needle on it just a few weeks ago that was going to be aimed at somebody and shot with that needle on the end of it. I saw right over there a guy swinging around a machete. We want to feel safe to come down to our downtown. We don't want to have it taken and run over.
If Nanaimo's downtown seems a little quiet, it may be related to how people are feeling about it. Among the downtown residents feeling less safe is Brian Rice. You've been broken into that? Yeah. Many times. At one point it was like literally every six weeks I was having a break in. If you're struggling to meet your rent payment and somebody steals your kids bicycle or your kids bicycles, I mean it's a bit of a crisis for you. People rarely say, gee, Len, I need the pothole fixed. They immediately want to talk about the street disorder. I use that term to describe all of the things that go on that are disturbing people. And that is occurring a lot. In this one block area, Victoria Crescent, over the last month, five businesses have had their windows smashed just last night right here at that 50s barbershop.
And how has this location generally been over those last 16 years? The past four or five years, it really started to sink down and get really rough. I've built it up for 16 years. Every little piece of this is a part of my personality. So to see it smashed and stuff all over the floor and stuff is very disheartening. Security footage captures what police say is a drug field range in the Naimo last night. The window is broken at 10 o'clock last night. The police got him because we could identify him. And the cops said he'll be out just after he goes to court in the morning after breakfast.
You can talk to the RCMP and officer right now if you walk by. They could name off the top of their head who that small group of people are that are causing these problems. This small group of repeat offenders have frustrated police not only in the Naimo, but across the country who increasingly feel handcuffed by a system that simply isn't allowing them to do their jobs. There's a lot of frustration on a part of the police officers for the amount of time it goes into getting in charge before the courts. And they find that individuals have been released and it commits another crime.
They may be arrested at 8 o'clock in the morning and they're telling police officers who arrest them they're laughing at them saying I'm going to be released before you even finish your shift. And it's true. Which means if this is your 50th or 60th or 100th conviction for shoplifting, B&E theft of auto, the chances of you actually going to jail for any significant time is almost nothing zero. I had a conversation with the cop one night and he said you know there's nobody more aware of this problem than the police. You know he said many of us got into the police force to fight crime to protect our communities and he says we spend our time babysitting criminals. We'll have an individual who does shoplifting and they'll have 50 to 60 convictions just on shoplifting.
This is what the people you see downtown who are breaking into cars and doing residential or commercial B&E's. If that's when vehicles this is going to stop. Do people do you think kind of these repeat criminals think they can gain the system? They have. They've been gaming the system since I've been a crime attorney. They've been certainly gaming it under Justin Trudeau's watch in 2015 and continue to do so. With Canadians living in fear and municipalities begging for help, how has the federal government responded?
Has Justin Trudeau passed legislation to keep repeat violent offenders behind bars or by introducing Bill C5 in 2021 has he elected to go in a decidedly different direction? There was 14 significant criminal offenses. Kidnapping, criminal harassment, discharging a weapon in the commission of offense, unarmed robbery, trafficking in drugs such as fentanyl. There were significant mandatory minimum penalties for those offenses. That's what the government took away. Justin Trudeau's Bill C5 supported by the NDP received royal assent in 2022, meaning that for the past year, 14 serious offenses carried no minimum sentences at all.
But even more controversially has been another piece of legislation, Bill C75. The Liberal government has table Bill C75. This looks at changing the way that our courts work with the goal of getting to more cases faster and perhaps making the process less prone to discrimination. The federal government brought in a bill, I think it was 2019, called Bill C75. And in C75, quite simply, it lowered the bar when it comes to a judicial interrelease. So made it easier for violent or repeat offenders to get bail.
Right. Bill 75 was a bill that changed the nature of the criminal justice system. Judges were sort of dictated to consider release as the opening position for any individual, regardless of circumstance, regardless of the offense, regardless of the criminal record of the offender, it shackled the discretion of judges. It emphasized to crown attorneys that we need to focus on the releasing the accused. I love being a bank of a police officer.
I don't know if I could do this job today because I'm sure I would find it way too frustrating. So if you're taking a shop lifter and you've arrested this person three times or four times and you learn that they've got 150 previous convictions and you're filling out this report that takes you two hours knowing when you're writing it, it's going to go to crown. He's going to get bail. He's going to be out or she's going to be out in a matter of hours and they're going to go back and do the same thing possibly at the same store.
So there is a frustration factor because you don't ever get ahead of things because the system doesn't allow you to prevent this occurring again. And it isn't just thieves, vandals, and other petty criminals that have been receiving bail en masse since the passage of the bill. In the past three years, individuals arrested for violent offenses who were then subsequently released were involved in 26 homicides and more than 2,100 assaults in the city of Edmonton alone. While in Windsor, violent crimes committed by those out on bail have increased by more than 400%.
Since its passage and some of the bail reform, we've seen some very high-profile crimes, murders being committed by people out on bail. I believe the individual that killed the OPP officer was on bail. That individual ought to have been detained in custody, should have remained in custody, that was a completely avoidable tragedy in my view. There are some members of the community that shouldn't have the right to be out. They are just so highly violent. Their history shows that when they're released, they are going to commit serious violence towards a community. And by ignoring it, you're putting communities in harm's way.
To illustrate just how incomprehensible the situation has become, data from British Columbia shows that since the introduction of Bill C-75, judges even granted bail 75% of the time to individuals charged with committing a violent offense who were already out on bail for another criminal charge. The kind of brazen insanity that solicited the rare non-partisan rebuke from all 13 provincial and territorial premiers in the country in the form of assigned letter demanding changes addressed to Prime Minister Trudeau.
But a closer look at cop killer Randall Mackenzie's bail application shows something else equally troubling. The judge acknowledged Mackenzie's record of violent crime, but decided to release him anyways due to his indigenous identity. Part of a growing and controversial trend in Canada's justice system to weigh ethnicity and skin color against concerns of public safety.
In Vancouver, police are now forced to take into account a suspect's ethnicity when deciding whether or not to handcuff them. While across BC, the NDP government explicitly directs prosecutors to weigh against pursuing criminal charges just because an offender happens to be a member of an at-risk community. to be indigenous. An approach retired VPD officer Curtis Robinson strongly disagrees with. If you commit a crime, the color of your skin shouldn't matter. You just broke into the house and beat this guy half the death of the pipe. Everybody should be subject to the same rules. The color of your skin should not be a factor.
Another thing that's propped up a lot is the idea that there are two different standards in the criminal justice system for people with different ethnic backgrounds. Do you think that's a slippery slope to go down as a country? Well, my view has always been that the law in Canada should apply the same to everyone irrespective of color, ethnicity, sex, whatever. There shouldn't be two sets of laws. To me, it's bad policy. You can't have different rules for different people in the same country.
As you said, the case in Saskatchewan probably should never have happened. I mean, it's hard on the facts that we know it's hard to understand why the person was out. In 2022, repeat violent offender Miles Sanderson, who had already been charged 125 times, including twice for attempted murder, was released in part due to his indigenous identity. He returned back to a small community of James Smith Cree Nation, where he would shortly thereafter violently murder 11 innocent people in a stabbing rampage, the majority of whom were indigenous. An example of how releasing violent criminals just because of their ethnic background can boomerang back to hurt those very same Canadians the most.
The criminal justice system has abandoned the idea that crime has to be punished. I mean, that's why I think we get these strange result because we're, as a society, we seem unable or willing to punish people who do evil things. And when a justice system can no longer prevent criminals from committing crimes or provide victims with the restitution they deserve, individuals often feel forced to take matters into their own hands.
Clint Smith, a small business owner from Nanaimo, has had to deal with a crippling amount of property crime at the location of his business. One day, Clint received word from a friend that his recently stolen property had been spotted at a nearby tent encampment with police either unwilling or unable to retrieve his property on his behalf. He headed down the embankment himself along with a small group of friends.
As I went down there, I mean, I point blank, said I wanted no violence, no aggression, and I wound up shot in the hospital. And yeah, so that part of you feel comfortable talking about it. Obviously, at some point, a gun came out from one of these individuals. Three different guns. Three different guns. Yeah, one was a pellet gun, one was a 22 rifle. You were shot with the 22. I was shot with the 22. There was a lot of 22 shots flying around all over the place. The biggest failure as a father and biggest regret as a family man is what I put my wife and my son through. Clint spent five days in a medically induced coma, undergoing three surgeries, which saved his life. But four days later, after Clint woke up, his attacker had already been released on bail. And Craig Edwards Trukle, who had inexplicably only been charged with pointing a firearm, added another offense to his already lengthy criminal record.
I don't think I can emphasize how crucially critical this has affected my family. My wife has been traumatized. My son has been traumatized. It's ruptured the community around me. I feel like I'm like an epicenter of fractures through our community.
This shocking story and others have galvanized the community, banding together to form safety groups like the Nanaimo Area Public Safety Association. I met with a member of that group who watches over Knob Hill Park in downtown Nanaimo. Has this park had any problems itself? This park has had huge problems. Not when I was growing up. It was a safe place. Everyone, you know, this was filled with kids and you just came home at dinner time kind of thing. Now a day's your car gets broken into petty crimes constantly. You can find people in your backyard sometimes shooting up. There's shady people, you know, staying overnight here, tenting. The park can get filled with needles. You just, you would not be able to leave your child or let your child go to the park.
But it's not just parks where homelessness open drug use and anarchy have taken over. It's in much of the downtown. In Nanaimo, a city of just 100,000, there are an estimated 700 people suffering from drug addiction currently living homeless on the streets.
To get a sense of the scale of the issue in the city, I joined Nanaimo Community Safety Officers as they conducted wellness checks. downtown on those at risk to OD. It became immediately apparent that this small coastal city had a very serious problem. How much worse is kind of the drug and addiction from gotten in? And I'm looking for a door when you were growing up here. Yeah, I can't even quantify how bad it's got. But it's bad, you know, like I say, I'm born and raised here and this is the worst I've seen the streets. And this right now just to explain what's happening, you guys do this is a wellness check? Yeah, just a wellness check. So make sure people are okay. You know, do they need to be connected with our Island Health Partners for a womb care? Hey, you guys okay? You guys good? Okay, just checking.
Nanaimo has a clip. It's highest annual total of overdose deaths in just 10 months. It's a terrifying trend taking place across the country and it's killing an average of 17 Canadians a day. The powerful opioid fentanyl is the main driver. It's been found in the systems of 85% of people who overdosed this year.
Drug addiction in Canada is out of control. Crack, crystal meth, fentanyl. These dangerous drugs have ravaged Canadian communities, killing more than 6,000 Canadians just last year, including more than 2,000 from British Columbia alone. An increase of more than 1,000% in just 15 years.
But just how addictive are these drugs and what makes them so addicting? To answer that question, I met with Dr. Nathaniel Day, an addictions medicine specialist and former member of Alberta's Opioid Emergency Response Commission. Opioid addiction is such a terrible affliction. Like if you and I were evil and we were trying to mess up people's lives using a drug, I know Pioid's the perfect drug to do that with. If you take the same dose that makes you high today for about 5 or 6 days, that dose will not make you high in that same way after that 5 or 6 days and you'll need more. As soon as you stop, you get desperately sick. You know that withdrawal nightmare really is reinforcing for people where their brain's screaming at them saying, you can fix this right now. All you have to do is score.
The prevalence of drugs like fentanyl in the streets of Nanaimo have made overdoses a common occurrence with a record of 74 people dying in the city from overdose just last year. Part of a much larger battle with addiction, I witnessed firsthand I gained that evening when I accompanied a community safety officer on his nightly patrol. After only an hour, we came across one such individual in serious medical distress.
The community safety officer I was with introduced me to a homeless woman the following morning. I wanted to know how the streets had changed since the opioid epidemic had spiraled out of control.
第二天,我和社区安全官见到了一名无家可归的妇女。我想了解自鸦片危机失控以来,街道情况是否有所改变。
The opioid epidemic, I mean you obviously have a front row seat to being in Imo and homeless, like most affected communities and over 2,000 people died last year in BC from overdose. Yes. Have you seen that also been getting worse? I didn't even know what an overdose really was. I had never seen it until I was on the streets. I've seen it too many times now. In the past two years, I don't know how many people, how many of my friends that I've lost a lot. So it's yeah, it's just getting worse.
I can tell you as of right now in the last five days, five people have passed away that are actually quite close to me. They get a friend of mine who overdosed in the forest here just last night, absolutely. Do you have a problem with the addiction of anything or alcohol? Yeah, yeah, I have fentanyl for sure. Yeah. Is there a reason why you prefer kind of the forest in the streets? You know, not that many people come into the forest, especially at night. It's not as safe as night as it used to be.
A lot of people we've talked to said it's got a sketch here, you know, in the street that used to be? Because there's a lot more of them. I've seen a lot of new faces in the last three weeks. Really? A lot of new faces. And that creates some issues? It creates havoc. It used to be somewhat safe. You used to be able to sleep outside and it would be okay. Your shit wouldn't get stolen. It's been the last I'd say about four years. It's gotten progressively worse. Now it's just the worst. When I first started living on the streets here, there was just a short handful of us. We were a small, tight-knit group for the most part, but now there's just so many freaking homeless people everywhere.
You feel less safe than you used to? Oh yeah. Are you kidding? I sleep with something in one hand and something in the other hand and I'm not kidding. Like you have to hide. Otherwise, you don't know what's gonna happen. I mean, you get four guys. There's nothing I can do. Nine out of ten people on the street are carrying a weapon at all times, obviously.
What do you think's causing that? And is it different kinds of drugs just new people? I think it's a combination of a few things. The drug thing where people go into psychosis and stuff. The junkies that are on the nod. You could deal with someone right now in an hour from now. They're having a mental breakdown or they're high or coming down off their drugs and they've got a rock and want to smash a window out or there's conflict amongst the group.
How much of it, in your opinion, is being fueled directly or indirectly by issues relating to drugs and drug addiction? Well, there's two issues. One, we have plephic offenders who are their curriculum, vitae, amin, criminal. I do crime and normally to fuel their drug addiction. Then we have issues in the community where people who have drug addictions, they have mental health issues that are unchecked. Those are the ones that are causing real concern. Those are the ones where we see these sporadic incidents of violence where they're fixated on a window and they break it or they'll randomly assault somebody in the community. That's troubling.
How much of that is directly or indirectly related to drug and drug addiction? Oh, I would say all of that. And when your cities have rampant open drug use, the chaos that inevitably follows is right out in the open for all to see.
Random attacks are on the rise. Vancouver police are investigating an early morning homicide on the downtown east side. It is the same Tim Hortons where an employee had hot coffee thrown at her a week earlier. Disturbing murder on the downtown east side, he was found badly burned shortly after midnight. A stranger to her came up to her poured some sort of flammable substance on her and led her on fire. The suspect allegedly stabbed our victim with a hypodermic needle.
When it comes to lawlessness and drug-fueled chaos, there is still no place quite like Vancouver's downtown east side. I met with Leo Knight, a retired Vancouver police officer, to ask him how the downtown east side had changed over the past 30 years.
People did not live on the streets back in the day in the downtown east side. There was no such thing as injecting drugs on the street. It just wouldn't happen. I guarantee you that if you go down the downtown east side right now, they're all drug addicts. The 100 East Hastings now is it's a zoo. It's the largest, largest open-air drug bizarre in the world.
Accompanied by rampant drug addiction and the mental health issues it brings, the downtown east side is a dangerous place. Marshall Smith was once a resident of the downtown east side before entering recovery and gradually rebuilding his life. Incredibly, rising to the rank of chief of staff to Alberta Premier, Danielle Smith. At some point around 2004, I sort of lost my career to drug use and wound up hanging up my suit and tie at the legislature and vanishing into the streets of Vancouver, where I lived for four and a half years as a as a homeless drug addict. Obviously, those were very dark and difficult times in my life.
As part of Marshall's role as chief of staff to the premier and because of his unique background and experience, he has helped spearhead Alberta's opioid response strategy over the past four years. A strategy that differs significantly from the one being pursued by David E. B. in British Columbia and supported by Justin Trudeau. We're willing to work with provinces who want to move forward on different steps. We're having good conversations with the British Columbia about something they want to do there. But they're specifically calling for decriminalizing drugs. Yes, they are. And we are looking at where to do that. British Columbia is looking at that talking with that. And we are working with them to see how we can move forward with them in the right way.
On January 31st, 2023, the government of BC, granted approval by the federal government, made it legal to possess certain quantities of hard drugs, including crystal meth, heroin, fentanyl, and cocaine. Declaring in no uncertain terms that open drug use was now legal on the streets of British Columbia. And the results were immediate and available for all to see. How did that like change on the ground, like that you've seen with your own two eyes? Oh, within the same day, everything changed the next day. It was tenfold. It was everywhere people used them like crazy. There was a guy in the washroom shooting up and they said, hey, you can't do this in here. And he said, it's legal now. We can we can do whatever we want. So you can't stop us. It's illegal to do drugs on a smoke property or at the airport. And the rest is fair game. And they actually said there's more stricter bylaws about smoking tobacco near my door than there is about drugs.
So you can't smoke a cigarette near my door, but you can smoke meth. All the rules are gone now. So it doesn't matter. You can openly smoke crack in front of a store. And someone that tells you you got to move on is going to tell you where to go. Is it easier to take it or dissuade someone from drinking alcohol openly in public than using some of these other substances? Well, we can actually do something when somebody's drinking in public. We can issue a ticket for I think it's $230 for consuming public. And where somebody is smoking a swell amount of crystal meth or fentanyl. And it's under 2.5 grams. There's nothing we can do. They're not within those sanctioned areas.
Candidly, we know that the police for the last few years, pretty much everywhere, have not been charging drug users who had small amounts anyway. If I walk down the street and I'm with a beer in my hand, I could be arrested. I'm fine. But if I'm taking crystal meth sitting in the bench in front of, you know, everybody's favorite coffee shop, no big deal. It's that kind of approach. And again, as I understand the concept, but I must say just as a human being and a citizen, it ain't saleable politically. It doesn't make sense. And no one honestly believes it's going to reduce the number of deaths from the toxic drug supply. The only thing that that does is empower the drug dealers and empower the gangs.
Basically, what you're doing is you're giving them the ability to have under the legal limit and that they just have to do extra runs for the drugs. But if police weren't arresting drug users for possession, why did Trudeau and the BC government push ahead with their plan to decriminalize drugs? Well, in their words, it's all part of their plan to destigmatize drug use across Canada, believing that this will somehow entice more drug users to seek treatment and recovery.
Through this exemption, we will be able to reduce the stigma, the fear and shame that keep people use drugs silent about their use. But is that actually true? My experience is that there, you know, people who are struggling with addiction don't really care about the stigma associated with possessing drugs or using drugs.
There is a certain narrative that if you say that's stigmatizing when it's supposed to inherently apologize, you know, I should approve of everything. No one really believes that. You know, it's a question of what do we stigmatize it? The challenge is that sometimes shame and stigma are why people seek treatment.
We have never had more success when it comes to treating addiction in our society than we have with addiction to tobacco. And we take a very strong approach, right? We tell people that they should quit. We tell them that help is available. We make that help free. You know, we help them in their recovery. We expose them to the consequences of their actions. We stigmatize them, right, you know, for what they're doing. But for whatever reason, you know, the advocate, drug user advocates have gone a different direction with other substances. They started with this what they call harm reduction, right? Trying to prevent the harms instead of preventing drug use.
And I say the biggest form of harm reduction is preventing drug use in the first place. You know, these people who sit in their little offices somewhere have never dealt with an addict, have never treated an addict, have never talked even to an addict like I have. Think that people don't go to treatment because of the stigma involved. Well, that's of course hockey, you know, like when someone's addicted, all they're capable of is thinking about how they get their next fix. The brain gets hijacked by the addiction.
Harm reduction is like throwing in a life preserver, leaving them in the river. Over the past 20 years, drug prevention programs in British Columbia have been scaled back dramatically and replaced with what's known as harm reduction, ranging from the provision of naloxone kits to students as young as 15 to the distribution in at least one case of safer snorting kits at a high school on Vancouver Island.
But in truth, these so-called harm reduction policies from government, along with decriminalization, are only just the beginning. Their real objective is something else entirely. We know that anchoring ourselves in science and data, making sure that issues of harm reduction, safe consumption are put to the forefront, who will continue to be grounded in what works in compassion, in evidence. Making sure there's a safer supply. So people who are addicted can get clean drug supplies as opposed to having to buy the dirty and deadly stuff.
Safe supply. It's a buzz phrase used by politicians and drug advocates alike, meant to instill public confidence that the powers that be are taking the overdose crisis seriously and are doing something about it. But what does it mean? According to Health Canada, safe supply or safer supply refers to providing prescribed medications as a safer alternative to the toxic illegal drug supply. Its intention is to help prevent overdoses and save lives.
Now at first glance, that sounds pretty good. But looking deeper into what safe supply really means, the sunshine in rainbows quickly fade into a dark dystopian nightmare. You're looking at what's intended to be British Columbia's first legal cocaine lab. On February 17th, 2023, ad-astra holdings, a cannabis company based in Langley, BC, received approval from Health Canada to legally import coco leaves and manufacture cocaine. The company CEO said in a press release that it will explore the commercialization of cocaine to provide a safe supply of the drug.
This follows a wrapping up of supposed harm reduction policies in the province, even the launch of vending machines containing heroin substitutes, all under the guise of safe supply. But this isn't just happening in BC. I traveled to London, Ontario, the epicenter of the push for safe supply in that province to meet with Dr. Sharon Koivu, an expert in the field of addiction and safe supply. I wanted to know exactly how long this has been happening in London and where it all came from.
Safe supply started in London in about 2012. There were lots of people who were very vulnerable, particularly people that were identified as being vulnerable were street level sex workers. So the initial thought was to keep people safe so they don't have to be selling their bodies to get drugs was to give them a prescription. And the prescription that was decided on was delotted.
Delotted is the brand name for the opioid hydromorphone, a drug used in medical settings to reduce severe short-term pain. This hydromorphone for people that don't know, for including myself, is this kind of a low-level opioid or is this a powerful? No, it's a powerful addictive opioid.
It's similar to OxyContin. It's a very powerful, very. addictive opioid. Once a last ditch pain medication, hydromorphone has found its way into the safe supply program. It's now freely prescribed by doctors to addicts as a theoretical substitute for street drugs. We are giving out huge amounts of a very highly addictive, very dangerous opioid narcotic. Safe supply is a marketing term. It's not a medical term. It's a term that was made in a boardroom with communications experts and advocates and it's made to communicate to people the feeling of safety.
It's not safe. We're referring to that as though it was safe and it's not safe. I don't like calling it safe supply because it's not safe. But how different really is hydromorphone from other opioids like fentanyl? How powerful is hydromorphone and how addictive can it be? To find out, I met with a pharmacist in BC who wished to remain anonymous for fear of losing her job.
Basically the biggest one for safe supply is hydromorphone. Hydromorphone is like 20 times stronger than morphine. This whole term of like safe supply, like I'd like to know what the definition of safe is. There's no such thing as a safe opioid. Did you be concerned if you had family members or friends that started using this on a regular basis? 100%. 100%. Like I would never take it. I would never tell one of my friends to take it.
Funny enough, I actually did one time. My friend broke her ankle and she was prescribed hydromorphone for pain but she was prescribed one milligram tablets. To compare that to the safe supply, the one that we prescribe is eight milligrams. So she was prescribed one milligram for pain and I even warned her on how addictive that can be. How many pills would you guess that you would dispense on an average shift? Probably a thousand a day. A thousand? A thousand a day. If one milligram of hydromorphone can be dangerous and addictive, you can imagine how dangerous the eight milligram pills are that are freely handed out to addicts.
But perhaps that is the point. Pharmacies are a business like any other and they rely on a steady stream of customers. And with the addictive nature of hydromorphone, it's big business for these pharmacies and that has led to some shady business practices. Can you also explain there were some scandals in the downtown East Side that you also saw about what was going on between the pharmacies?
Yeah. So I think it's more prominent on the downtown East Side because there are so many pharmacies. You go down the street and you see it's like Starbucks. You see pharmacies on every single corner. But when you're somewhere like Vancouver where there's so many different pharmacies, it's like what makes a patient want to choose this pharmacy or the other pharmacy, right? A lot of the pharmacies on the downtown East Side will provide like monetary incentives to their patients to come to their pharmacies. Essentially kickbacks? Yeah. Like you saw that like it was normal and then pharmacies will offer more and more money because they want those people to come use their pharmacy basically. Because I guess if it's a daily thing, for a whole year it could be ten thousand dollars in business for them. So you offer a patient a hundred bucks. It's the whole world to them but it's nothing to these pharmacy owners based on how much money they'll make off of them.
A legal business practices aside, maybe paying addicts to take safe supply is a good thing. That is, if bribing an addict to take hydromoraphone means they won't take fentanyl, shouldn't that decrease deaths from overdose? Since the introduction of these so-called safe supply drugs, have you seen that help with reducing fentanyl and fentanyl overdoses?
We had very little fentanyl in London prior to safe supply. Since safe supply we now have a huge problem with fentanyl in the city. There has been an increase in overdose deaths, an increase in use of fentanyl, and a decrease in the cost of fentanyl in the city as well. The presence of hydromoraphone is not touching in any positive way fentanyl on the street if anything it is fueling it.
But how could it possibly be that giving people a replacement for fentanyl would somehow increase their use of that exact same drug? Addicts want fentanyl, right? They want the big high and the big hit. They pursue fentanyl because it's a superior high to what they're getting from these hydromoraphone pills. It was just about chasing the next high. It was just about getting high. It didn't phase me. The stronger the drug was, the better that people would go look for.
Really? Mm-hmm. Because the stronger it is, the better. If you know people who are overdosing on that, that's the stuff that. people want. Really? Mm-hmm. Because that's how, I guess, the quality is better when people are overdosing on it. Okay, well that's the stuff I got to get. I didn't even care. I didn't care about my life.
Do you ever have any experience with seeing patients when it comes to this so-called safe supply of not adhering to how they were supposed to take it or not taking it at all? Every single day. Every single day. They're either injecting them or they're taking all of them at once or they're not taking them at all. Then that's, they're not taking them at all. It's where they have the biggest problem.
And why would they not be taking them at all? To sell them to make money. And so they'll take their daily supply bottle that they get and they'll sell it on the sidewalk and they'll use the money to buy fentanyl. Right now, for example, I am seeing a patient who has prescribed 40 tablets of D8s that allotted 8 milligrams every day. We have her on nine in a day. That means she is likely selling 31 of the 40 pills that she has prescribed.
What many Canadians might not understand about safe supply is that most addicts don't want to take the prescribed drugs like hydromorphone. Instead, they get prescription safe supply drugs with the purpose of selling them so they can purchase the drugs they actually want like fentanyl. And according to the BC pharmacist I spoke with, patients ever pharmacy don't even bother hiding this fact.
I see it quite literally see it every day. I will see patients come into the pharmacy and they will pick up their prescription, walk out of the pharmacy and hand a bottle of pills over to somebody and have a cash exchange and sell their pills. And how easy would it be for someone to walk over there and get? Easy. But yeah, very easy. There's no control over the medications. My kids could walk around the corner and easily get it.
People would be prescribed these medications and there would be people waiting outside the pharmacy in one of the towns here. They would be waiting outside the pharmacy because they knew someone was going to eventually come out and sell their prescriptions. It's become so common to sell your prescription safe supply that dillies are like a type of currency now. Oh, you want a blanket? Okay, give me two dillies and I'll give you this blanket that I found. Or there's the monetary value of selling it and most oftentimes patients will sell their delaudids and then go buy something stronger.
It took us about half an hour on East Hastings Street and we were able to buy 26 tablets. We're told this is hydromoraphone also known as dillies also known as delaudid. Total price, $30. A little more than a buck a pill. I almost feel like sometimes I'm like this has to be a joke. Like this isn't happening, right? Like it's like even people know like I'm going to go wait outside of this pharmacy and that person's going to go in there and get their delis and then I'm going to buy it. And it like almost makes a joke of what we're doing. It makes a joke of the pharmacies. It makes a joke of the clinics.
Anybody knows that they can just sit out that pharmacy and buy it. You could go sit there right now and watch it happen. It's very very in the open. They don't even try to hide it.
Far from trying to hide it, sidewalks around the safe supply pharmacies like this one in Nanaimo headed all out in the open. The remnants of consumed or traded safe supply littered the streets. A phenomenon that anyone living close to one of these pharmacies in a safe supply province can tell you is a new feature of Canadian cities no matter their size. I read an article the other day in Nanaimo. I think it was where they just found routinely pill bottles littered all over the place from from addicts getting their supply and dumping the bottle and selling it.
Colin Middleton, a resident of downtown Nanaimo, lives a block away from a safe supply clinic and pharmacy. After moving to Nanaimo from Calgary, he started to notice a pattern in the garbage littering his street. Late last year, I was just kind of picking up trash on the sidewalk outside of my house and I came across, you know, a label. I picked it up, looked at it. I didn't know what hydromorphone was. Why would somebody peel off the label? So then in January, I found another one. I was like, okay, this is a pattern now. But before I knew it, I had over 80 of them.
One day I went into the pharmacy. I said, look, there's obviously a problem here and you need to deal with this. And the pharmacist sort of said, like, there's not really much we can do. You know, go talk to the doctor, tell them what you think or like take it up with the province or whatever. But it's only been since then that I've come to understand that our medical profession already knows this is happening as a way for quote, you know, safe supply of opioid medications getting into the street supply.
Shockingly, a handful of doctors that prescribe safe supply are not only aware that the hydromorphone is being diverted, they seem not to care. The best case scenario, the doctor will be like, okay, that's not right. Let's discontinue it. This patient clearly does not need it for themselves. It's not safe. Let's discontinue it. But I've also had situations where I've told the doctors that the patients are selling medications and they don't care. And I have had doctors tell me, well, that's okay if they're selling because that means that somebody somewhere is getting a safe supply. So it's just crazy how something that was supposed to be meant to help people.
What I'm finding is the people that are buying these pills, it's like sometimes people who have never even tried opioids. And what bothers me the most is that I see like young kids coming and buying these pills. The hydromorphone is ending up in the high schools now. And it's become so normalized in high schools that you can walk around in high school and just ask for dillies. Really what the safe supply is doing is it's just creating the next generation of people who have opioid use disorder.
This is a 16 year old girl currently in recovery from hydromorphone addiction. When did you first hear about hydromorphone or what kind of names are people using forward on campuses? So obviously being young you don't know too much about what everything's called, what the professional names for, let's say what it is, so it would be dilly or deluded and stuff like that. Nobody ever really calls it hydromorphone or anything like that. And when did you first hear about it? Do you remember or when did you first notice people using them or? I say when I like started grade 10, like beginning of grade 10, so beginning of last year, it almost destroyed my life.
Thanks to our own government introducing safe supply drugs like hydromorphone into street circulation, it has now never been cheaper or easier for children to get their hands on highly addictive and deadly opioids. Are people using it you think even younger than grade 10? I see 14 to 13 year olds using hydromorphone. Like sometimes even 12 year olds. It's like I hate saying it out loud because it's like you always don't want to believe it. Like it doesn't seem real at all but it's so real. I am now seeing much younger people than I've ever seen in my life. I even had a 15 year old patient who was in grade nine tell me he started when he was an elementary school and what kind of opioid did he do? It would have been delighted.
At the direction of our federal government, hydromorphone has flooded our streets and into the pockets of our children. Did you think it was safe and your friends? Yeah 100 percent. Me like being young, trusting the pharmacy and assuming this can't harm me in the long run type of thing and it wasn't the case at all though.
We would see patients come in. for for fentanyl use disorder and now come 2023 about half of our new intakes are addicted to hydromorphone. I saw it coming. I hoped it would never get into the high schools but yeah she came through our doors and I almost felt like crying. It was like my nightmare came true.
It seemed weird to both of you that I mean this is notionally brought in obviously a safe supply as part of harm reduction. Do you feel like it's creating more harm? 100 percent. 110 percent. Most people who are using this have never tried drugs before this like not opioids or anything like that so it's just straight to the opioids. It's definitely creating a lot more addicts than there was before.
How did this happen? How do we find ourselves in this dystopian reality? Well according to Marshall Smith this all began with another medically prescribed opioid, OxyContin. So this really started with a company called Purdue Pharmaceuticals. They are widely credited for you know for these actions. They doctored the research that went into the safety and effectiveness of their product. They infiltrated the medical regulators. They did everything that they could to get their product you know into the hands of patients and of course because there was so much of it you know going out under the street dealers would get it and remarket it you know which is which is often what's happening with these safe supply drugs now.
After decades of devastation the BC government launched a class action lawsuit against Purdue Pharma for their role in fueling the BC addictions crisis but ask yourself how is government funded safe supply any different than Purdue selling of OxyContin especially when you consider that dilauded the brand name for the hydromorphone currently being distributed by the government is manufactured by the exact same company.
You saw all of the damage that was created by OxyContin in the community. Hydromorphous two to three times stronger than OxyContin. Stronger than OxyContin for sure. So this is a way bigger you know issue.
But OxyContin caused the problem in the first place. Yes. So the government went after Purdue. Yes. And they kind of took their pill bottles off the street and then are supplying a drug that is basically the same except even more powerful. Yes. So they're doing the same thing today that they are currently suing these companies for doing 10 years ago. Except the drugs more powerful. The drug is more powerful. Yeah. Yeah.
It doesn't even sound real saying this but like I have patients who the whole reason that they became addicted to opioids was because one time their doctor prescribed them OxyContin they got hooked. So I have those people who are now getting this prescribed safe supply. They're selling to other people who are just going to end up in this same thing like it's just this circle.
During the huge ramp up of legally produced clearly labeled consistent quality prescription opioids more Americans and Canadians died of those legally produced opioids than died in World War I and World War II combined. And that was that is very very recent history. We got here from companies saying this same line of reasoning you know don't be opioid phobic.
We're going to prescribe these very generously. We'll give them out in the community in all kinds of ways at a much higher level than we ever have. And because they are FDA approved or approved by you know Health Canada they're safe. And you know millions of people got addicted hundreds of thousands of people died. And we still have people dying from those medications today including by the way a number of people who are dying from street fentanyl.
If you follow back their story they started on one of those you know allegedly safe you know opioid prescriptions. I started using Percocets. And then yeah I just kind of went downhill after that.
I was like sleeping in alleys or sometimes I wouldn't even sleep just because like when you go to sleep people steal your stuff. So at night I'd like do a shot. They're called the speedballs where you mix fentanyl and meth together. What was kind of the first one that first pill that you started doing? The Percocets. It was the Percocets. Yeah.
Grew up in a really good family both of my parents were together. It was just the people I was hanging out with at the time had the drugs, had the beans. And after that first line I just continued to want it. I started off with 10 little ones and when I no longer needed them I found that I was still abusing them. And then from there it just kept going. Then Tylenol 4s and then Percocets then morphine. And then it went to fentanyl.
I remember one. day I couldn't even walk. I found myself like crawling to use the washroom. I don't know how many times I had overdosed. I probably overdosed maybe over 10 times. Wow. Yeah. And did you have any close calls with fentanyl? Oh yeah I've overdosed like more than 20 times. Really? Yeah. I always thought that's how I was going to die. I was on the streets. It even got to a point where my family knew they were going to lose me like that.
After you'd overdosed, like did you accept the fact that you just might overdosed and die one day and that was just part of it? Or did you not think about that? I didn't think about that. All I thought of was getting high really. And what he has someone who lived at like what would happen if you go back to when you were on the streets. And they basically went and they offered everybody who was using fentanyl, addicted to fentanyl. A prescription for something like a hydromoraphone or or oxies or percocetzo. Then they'll never get out of that lifestyle. That's just telling them you might as well pick your own grave. We are creating something much worse than the opioid crisis that Purdue had ever started.
One of the patients I have was not in the safe supply program. His neighbor was in the program. She would sell him about 10 of her delauded in a day. So he was using all of the pills that he was getting and injecting those pills. He is developed through injecting those pills and that was the only thing that he was injecting. He has developed an infection low down in his spine and he right now is not able to use his legs at all. I'd be walking. They were giving out on me. I was falling down easily and I'm thinking why am I falling down so easily and you know over the course of a couple of days I wasn't able to walk. Anybody that I bought them from or that I saw with them was we're typically they were using them intravenously. Definitely.
Did that addiction really kind of take hold of you with percocets or was it the later drugs that really got you? Right from percocets. Right from percocets and they're small amounts but it was all it took. It's not it's a big deal. It changes a person's life once. Just with one pill. The harm I'm seeing to individuals and to the community there is nothing that can justify that and I don't know how much suffering has to occur to get that message out.
Despite all the pain and suffering I witnessed on this journey it also became apparent that there was always light at the end of the tunnel that given the right supports and incentives in some provinces at least treatment was available and recovery was possible. I went to jail in 2019 and got out in 2021 and that was like my turning point there. It was either I go to jail or I go to detox because I had drugs on school property so I chose to go to the detox center. I actually reached out for help one day. I knew someone who worked there I asked her if she can call the detox for me but I did end up going to detox that very same day.
These women were fortunate enough to have access to treatment and detox through Alberta's recovery oriented system of care. A treatment-centric approach to combating drug addiction that has been introduced and greatly expanded over the past four years and that stands in stark contrast with the strategy of other provinces of simply handing out free drugs. It is now known around the world as the Alberta model. What is the Alberta model? Well the Alberta model is a model based you know deeply on the belief that that government's prime duty is to help its citizens restore themselves, restore their self-agency and the model really is about eliminating barriers to access to care, improving the quality of care that is there and utilizing you know everything in our arsenal based on high quality evidence and that evidence is you know by and large you know around the world our model borrows bits and pieces from jurisdictions around the world like Portugal, Switzerland, Massachusetts and a lot of Alberta ingenuity quite frankly that has gone into it.
Like the Alberta model the Portuguese system is famous around the world but sometimes for the wrong reasons. Drug advocates in Canada often cite the fact that Portugal has decriminalized drugs while ignoring the more nuanced measures Portugal has taken to combat its addictions crisis, a constant source of frustration for Stanford professor and expert in addiction, Dr. Keith Humfries.
They also added something which people don't seem to know about in North America which is dissuasion commissions so it's not that if you use drugs in Portugal no one says anything about it please can still grab you they take you to a commission it's not there to hurt you but you know they do assess your case and they may say okay you know you don't seem to have a problem but if they think you do they will say you need to go to this treatment program and they can put pressure on you and they can do some fines they would not throw you in jail but it's a very clear message from the authorities that what you're doing is not okay and we want you to change.
What Alberta is trying to do is it novel in the North American sense is it borrowing from what's been happening in Portugal or what's your sense of what they're trying to do in Alberta? It's a bit like one of those impression is paintings you have to back up long enough to see the whole thing so first off it is in fact a system it's a recovery oriented system of care so there instead of it being sort of the step child of the policy world where nobody wants to think about addiction we'll build a few treatment agencies and that's all we're going to do it's linked together prevention early intervention harm reduction treatment and recovery and across different sectors so it's not just health and social welfare it's education it's criminal justice that that's that is critical to the idea of building a system the second thing is it's animated with a spirit of hope it is a recovery oriented system of care so the goal is not merely let's try to modestly reduce overdose deaths and then we'll call it a day the aspiration is way higher than that it's saying we actually want people to get to the point where they're in recovery so today in Alberta any person whether they're rural or downtown Calgary where we're at today anyone can call our toll-free number and get an assessment right now and get started on treatment today and so our median wait time for assessment and treatment in Alberta and basically every community all across the province is zero days as part of the goal to extend treatment and recovery to all Albertans who require it regardless of ability to pay.
Alberta has begun construction of 11 large treatment facilities spread out across the province in Red Deer the first such facility is almost ready to open a brand new building i was given a chance to tour with Marshall Smith Aaron this is the first of 10 large recovery communities that we're building here in Alberta these are different than the sort of normal treatment centers which are short-term 28-day programs these facilities are large high capacity facilities where clients can come and stay for up to a year at a time it's individualized care with full medical services in the one in renter.
75 beds 50 on the male side 25 on the female side separated they've got separate kitchens and people are going to be put through the work they're going to have going to do the therapy in the morning and chores in the afternoon or vice versa and they're going to have to learn how to cook learn how to take care of themselves learn how to take care of the facility learn how to do some community gardening maybe we'll end up seeing some kind of farmers market there and we'll be coaching people through how to develop the life skills so that they can get their individual agency back and then setting them on a pathway where they can pay it forward and help others i i think that that is a much more inspiring vision than then simply watching people slowly killing themselves which is i think what the alternative approach has been we we don't we won't give up on people and they are healing communities but things are done in groups right and they live a very structured day in contrast to the pure housing model where people come in and they get a hotel room and that they can continue to use drugs in their hotel room and and there's no structure to that i would say that that can be very dangerous and you know 75 percent of fatal overdoses occur at home on the living room floor so if you're giving somebody a living room floor and you are allowing them to continue using drugs in your facility the chances are you're probably going to find somebody dead instead of warehousing addicts in hotel rooms like the BC government these Alberta treatment facilities aim to build recovery communities.
Sure well we call them recovery communities for a reason right because uh it isn't just the treatment of addiction that happens here it is a reintegration into community it's. a rebuilding of community when people are on the street whether they're intent encampments or you know you see homeless people gathering uh that they do that because that is their community right that you know whether that community is attractive to us or not is irrelevant addiction is an illness of loneliness despair and isolation and so the antidote to that is building facilities like this where people can come together where they're not lonely where they're not isolated and where they're not in despair.
Any opioid vending machines here no opioid vending machines here no we're gonna skip the opioid vending machines as a government we believe very deeply that our job as government is to be the cheerleader in chief we have an obligation to provide the tools facilities like this like we do and all kinds of other areas of health care um to give the people of alberta the best shot recovery for this the alberta model has received international attention hosting a global conference in 2023 to showcase to the world its early success of the constantly we've seen the issues of addiction homelessness public safety grow and affect every community in alberta something definitely does need to be done in the criminal justice system and you bring something that hopefully we'll get worldwide and fast now in alberta first jurisdiction i think anywhere in north america any albert in anytime a day anywhere you live free of charge of elavious can receive treatment on the map uh and that is kind of great thank you very much appreciate it.
But not everyone is on board with the alberta model particularly the advocates for safe supply decriminalization and harm reduction in british columbia some of whom have financial incentives to ensure the alberta model doesn't succeed and the chief medical officer here in british columbia came out and said that you know if you're addicted to alcohol we've got freeman basically that's available to you but if you're addicted to opioids you know you're kind of out of luck and um you're going to be addicted to these things we're just going to basically ease your suffering as much as possible so how how does that make any sense um the chief medical officer and the chief coroner uh are not medical experts uh in terms of addiction uh and most of the things that they are saying are parroting activist and advocacy groups i don't really know what's going on there uh but we don't put any stock uh in that kind of narrative uh people have been recovering from this illness for generations for a hundred years uh and and they will continue to um i think it's very irresponsible for people in positions like that to to say such things and and i'm not sure what they benefit from doing that after the pandemic with the new our new system you know coming uh on board fatalities in british columbia have continued to increase and fatalities in in alberta are sitting at about 50 percent of what british columbia is at so you know we will continue in alberta to continue to save lives and to build an effective system of care to get people healthy to help them regain their self-agency and to restore themselves to sanity uh and and that is what we will continue to do and that is what we are doing but where does my home province of british columbia go from here what happens if bc continues down the path of safe supply and decriminalization where does it eventually end up.
Well, on the very last day of filming this episode I stumbled upon something I've never seen or heard of before, even on the downtown east side. So we're in Vancouver in the downtown east side, and we're just walking. We're actually here filming something else, and we just came across the story and tracked down. And there's a new truck that's just pulled up here that is, presumably illegally but in plain sight, selling cocaine, crack, MDMA, heroin, and crystal meth or some kind of methamphetamine. So we've taken some shots here. We're not sure if anyone's going to talk to us. That's presumably the line of people who are currently buying these substances. I don't see police or anything anywhere, so not exactly sure what is going on, but such is life in the city of Vancouver. I think it opened. This is the first day opening, and I'm going to buy some cocaine.
You think it's mainly cocaine-like? People in mind or just to mix everything? Some people are here for--I would assume fentanyl or heroin, right? I don't even know. I haven't even really looked at the menus. So I think moving away from fennel is the best thing. Of course, you know, once you start doing heroin, it's fentanyl's the only thing that works for you, right? So that's why these people are, you know, zombied out on fentanyl on the streets doing crime, robbing people, are breaking into breaking in businesses to support your habit. You know, if you're a detriment to the community, you know, of course, it's a difference.
As we were about to leave, three men approached me and said they had just seen Vancouver is Dying, the prequel to this film. Yeah, just watch the video. Yeah, just like 25 minutes ago. This is like a crazy like double coincidence where I was-- I was almost for five and a half years, much like that guy. He was known politics and Marshal Smith, yeah, yeah. Just so a lot like him, yeah, right? We put a lot of effort into keeping this one area very clean, and then we have this going on right here. Yeah, a block down the road, we have a recovery house treatment center, and it's right here. Is it kind of, uh, I mean, weird that there's like a block away from addictions clinic they're just openly selling? The same drive, I mean, how does--I mean, he felt he just wanted it. It's kind of insulting, especially for people who are just trying to get in, and then they--they walk past, they have to walk past this every day. Addiction is a disease of loneliness and isolation that says we do not have a disease, mhm, right? It's a disease of more, and without recovery, it's a field day out there so.