‘Government Heroin’ Documentary Exposes Widespread Secure Delivery Fraud

Despite ample evidence that Canada’s “safer supply” programs are being widely fraudulent and flooding communities with opioids, advocates continue to deny the problem exists. That’s why I premiered my new documentary this week, “Government heroin,” telling the story of Callum Bagnall, a 25-year-old student who bought thousands of diverted, safer pills in London, Ontario.

While many written reports of safer delivery fraud have been published in the Canadian media, This documentary offers the first extended interview with a former addict who openly describes his own use of these diverted drugs. It’s one thing to read these stories, and quite another to watch and listen to them – so perhaps this will help to dispel the myths that have been pushed rather aggressively by the harm reduction movement.

In the film, Callum explains how a friend told him three years ago that drug users in the city were being given “insane” amounts of free safer drugs – mainly hydromorphone, an opioid as powerful as heroin. Although these drugs are intended to wean addicts off riskier street drugs, the friend explains that recipients would often sell their safer supply at bargain prices so they could buy stronger drugs. such as illegal fentanyl.

At first, Callum thought this was a joke. He had struggled with a moderate addiction to pharmaceutical opioids—primarily oxycodone and Percocet—but because these pills were expensive and hard to find, his drug use had remained steady. The idea that the government was giving individuals hundreds of powerful opioid pills a month, for free and unsupervised, seemed “almost like a drug addict’s dream.”

But then he got in touch with some safer suppliers and realised everything he’d heard was true. Fuelled by an almost unlimited supply of dirt-cheap opioids, Callum’s drug use spiralled out of control and his life was thrown into chaos for two years. Although he went to rehab last year, he says his mind is still clouded by the after-effects of the drugs to this day.

“I would have been at the end of my rope and gone to rehab at that point if the safer drugs weren’t so cheap and available. With the small amount of money I was making, I could afford hundreds of safer pills a week because they were so cheap,” he says.

It was clear to Callum that these pills weren’t fakes, given their quality and consistency, and the fact that they usually came in their original, labelled prescription bottles: “Most of the time the people I bought them from would try to cross out the doctor’s name or their name. They were a bit paranoid about that. But sometimes they would just give it to me with the label untorn, not covered in marker or anything.”

Callum estimates that 90 per cent of Safer Supply clients he dealt with diverted their drugs. This figure is fairly consistent with estimates from former drug users I interviewed in London last year, who typically put the diversion rate in their circles at around 80 per cent.

Callum is also convinced that organized crime is involved in the trafficking of these drugs. He recalls one high-ranking dealer saying he drove to Northern Ontario, where safer supply is virtually unavailable, with thousands of pills in the trunk of his car to resell for a significant profit.

While I could not independently verify Callum’s claim about intra-provincial drug trafficking, his testimony is consistent with information I received earlier this year from Ontario’s Deputy Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, Michael Tibollo. He said that based on certain police reports and epidemiological data, it is clear that there is a particular problem with the trafficking of safer drugs from London into Northern Ontario.

Callum was able to corroborate the general outline of his story by providing dozens of screenshots of timestamps of text conversations between himself and his former dealers (some of which appear in the documentary), as well as excerpts from his medical records showing that he had been diagnosed with a serious opioid addiction and that he was “buying safer supply from friends.”

He also called a patient with a safer supply that he used to buy his medications from, and as I listened in, he got her to confirm that she had hundreds of pills ready to sell and could introduce him to a safer supply doctor if he wanted to participate in the program. A video recording of this conversation was originally intended to be included in the documentary, but was edited to minimize the risk of retaliation. The recording has been shared with and reviewed by: The Office.

(Editor’s note: It appears the phone call captured evidence of a patient who had a safer supply and had agreed to sell a large quantity of pills and introduce them to a doctor in person, rather than giving the doctor’s name in a phone call.)

Finally, Callum’s mother, a registered nurse, is featured in the documentary, who says that on the day her son went to rehab, she found safer medication bottles in her son’s room.

As public scrutiny of safer supply has increased in the past year, providers have insisted they are keeping a close eye on diversion through urine testing. Yet Callum says that while selling their drugs, clients he has interacted with have occasionally held back a few of their pills, openly admitting to him that they needed these small amounts to pass their tests.

“(They) also took one or two pills the night before they got their prescription so that it looked like it was in their system. It showed up on the urine tests. So they used that to pass the urine tests so they could get another prescription the next week,” he says in the film.

The exploitation of this leak was confirmed by Dr. Janel Gracey, an addiction doctor who treated Callum and who also appears in my documentary. She says that “it is well known in the addiction world that urine tests are not effective at detecting diversion,” because such tests only measure the presence of a drug, not the amount. A patient with a safer supply could divert almost all of his drugs and still pass his urine test, she says, as long as he only takes one pill before giving his samples.

Gracey characterizes Canada’s current safer supply system as an unregulated “free ride” that destabilizes patients while allowing some pharmacists and physicians to make significant profits. “I know people who are in the safer supply program who have never used fentanyl, and that’s the whole point of the program: to get them off fentanyl. So they just stand in line and get a bunch of (hydromorphone), really, for no reason,” she says.

Gracey estimates that of her 400 patients, about half have taken diverted safer drugs, or know someone who has. She says cheap hydromorphone is now “easily available on every street corner here in London,” and that dealers are “bombarding” her patients with the drug, causing many of them to “go off the rails.”

“We’re seeing younger patients coming in, unfortunately. Fifteen-year-olds (and) sixteen-year-olds coming in and they’re getting hooked on (hydromorphone) because it’s so incredibly cheap. It’s cheaper than alcohol,” she said. “We do get a few that are there for fentanyl use, but usually even the (young fentanyl users) have started on (hydromorphone).”

Fraud. Relapse. Addicted youth. Criminal and corporate profiteering. All these terrible things reinforce the themes often touched upon by The Office‘s drug and crime reporting: institutional incompetence and complacency have once again allowed drug trafficking to surge across the country. Policymakers who should be crippling organized gangs are supporting them, either out of incompetence or political opportunism. Problems exist in plain sight, but are shielded by willful blindness.

I encourage you to watch “Government heroin,” because the 19-minute documentary provides a more visceral and comprehensive account of the damage described here. There is no substitute for hearing testimonies with your own ears and eyes.