CBC suppressed evidence of youth accessing diverted “safer supply” opioids

Skewing stories to fit Liberal-friendly narratives is generally bad, but suppressing testimony that concerns the well-being of children is particularly concerning.

Greg Sword, father of 14-year-old Kamilah Sword, told the CBC that his daughter had used diverted safer supply opioids. [Screenshot from “Government Heroin 2” documentary"]

By Adam Zivo

For two years, harm reduction activists denied that “safer supply” opioids are being widely diverted to the black market, and insisted that reports of rampant fraud were just conservative-led “disinformation” and “fearmongering.” Evidence of abuse eventually became so overwhelming that the B.C. government was forced to implement major anti-diversion reforms last month, despite having previously gaslit the public about the very existence of this problem.

In all likelihood, we will never know exactly how many Canadians were harmed because of the apparent cover-up of this scandal. However, it is evident that the suppression of this story was abetted by many of Canada’s progressive journalists, who, seemingly befuddled by their own partisanship, failed to investigate or report upon the abundant (and easily accessible) evidence showing that safer supply programs were (and still are) being widely defrauded.

Not only were these journalists wilfully blind, at least one major media outlet withheld evidence confirming that youth have been harmed by diverted safer supply opioids.

Which media outlet would this be? The CBC, of course.

Around a year and a half ago, CBC Radio’s “The Current” interviewed two families who provided first-hand testimony confirming that Canadian teenagers were accessing, and developing addictions from, diverted safer supply opioids. Despite the obvious newsworthiness of this testimony, the public broadcaster inexplicably omitted it from subsequent reporting.

Although I’ve been aware of this story for over a year, I’m choosing to share it now because of recent calls for a public inquiry into safer supply – should such an inquiry occur, some attention should be given to how ideologically-motivated reporting contributed to this scandal. Furthermore, the upcoming federal election will almost certainly evoke more debate about whether the CBC should be defunded, so it’s important to call attention to the social costs of the organization’s left-leaning bias.

But, first, some important context.

For those new to this issue, safer supply programs give addicts free pharmaceutical-grade addictive drugs, such as hydromorphone and fentanyl, to dissuade use of riskier street substances. There is almost no monitoring of how these drugs are actually used, but unequivocal evidence shows that a significant portion of them are being resold on the black market and fueling new additions, including among youth.

Safer supply diversion first erupted into the national consciousness in May 2023, when the National Post published a 10,000 word investigative report I wrote on the issue. Unfortunately, harm reduction activists – along with the federal Liberals and BC NDP – responded with an aggressive gaslighting campaign, smearing critics as far-right conspiracy theorists.

They adamantly insisted, among other things, that youth were not accessing diverted safer supply drugs.

A month later, the National Post published another report of mine spotlighting the story of Kamilah Sword, a 14-year-old girl from the Vancouver area who, along with her friends, had developed a crippling addiction to hydromorphone. The girls had no idea that the opioid is as potent as heroin – if these pills were just prescription pain medication that had been marketed as “safe” by the government, how bad could they possibly be?

Kamilah died of drug-related causes in August 2022, while two of her friends escalated to using fentanyl before eventually entering rehab.

I wrote my article after interviewing Greg Sword (Kamilah’s father), three of her young friends, and some of the girls’ parents. The teenagers gave detailed descriptions of how they and their highschool acquaintances had abused hydromorphone; how they had witnessed overdoses caused by the drug; and how some of them had directly purchased these opioids from safer supply clients in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside.

Their testimony scandalized the province. Shortly after the National Post published my report, the B.C. government announced that it would conduct a review of its hydromorphone program. A month later, CTV News published its own article and video about Kamilah, which featured Greg Sword and detailed his concerns about safer supply.

The CBC, however, was strangely missing in action.

Whitewashing a dangerous Liberal program

In October 2023 – a full five months after Kamilah’s story originally broke – the CBC finally covered her death via the aforementioned episode of “The Current”, which was accompanied by an online news article. The organization’s journalists had interviewed Greg Sword, Amelie North (one of Kamilah’s friends who escalated to using fentanyl), and Denise Fenske (Amelie’s mother). It should be noted that Amelie and Densire were given pseudonyms, but have since gone public with their identities.

Something was amiss, though: the CBC failed to mention the fact that Kamilah and her peers had reported using diverted safer supply opioids. This was highly unusual, considering that this was the entire reason why these families’ stories were newsworthy in the first place.

The Current began its episode with clips of Greg Sword’s interview, but his testimony about safer supply diversion was left on the cutting room floor. The show’s host, Matt Galloway, mentioned to listeners that Kamilah and Amelie had used hydromorphone – but he conspicuously omitted the fact that Kamilah’s friends and family, and Amelie herself, had said that these opioids had been diverted from safer supply patients.

Following the opening segment with Greg, the episode transitioned to an interview with two pro-harm reduction medical experts, who speculated, without evidence, that Kamilah and her friends predominantly used illicit street drugs – a claim which falsely implied that safer supply opioids were not involved in their addictions.

This was then followed by a softball interview with B.C.’s then-Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, Jennifer Whiteside, who downplayed concerns about youth using diverted safer supply. She argued that the hydromorphone pills showing up on Canadian streets could just be counterfeit, and emphasized that, according to the B.C. Coroners Service, only 8 per cent of the province’s youth drug deaths between 2017 and 2022 were hydromorphone-involved.

But this statistic had been debunked months earlier.

Safer supply only became widely available in 2020, so citing a 2017-2022 average made as much sense as arguing “cars are not dangerous because vehicular fatalities were, on average, low between 1800 and 2022.” When broken down by year, the data told an entirely different story: 0 per cent of B.C.’s youth drug deaths were hydromorphone-involved between 2017 and 2019, then that number increased to 5.5 per cent in 2020, 9.6 per cent in 2021 and 22.2 per cent in 2022.

Whiteside’s minimizations would have been far less successful had the CBC: i) not censored first-hand testimony confirming that youth are consuming diverted safer supply opioids; and ii) interviewed medical experts who are not advocates for safer supply, and who could’ve easily debunked her misleading data.

The accompanying online news article was just as bad.

Greg, Amelie, and Denise were all quoted, but any comments they made that were critical of safer supply were, once again, omitted. Their stories were instead framed as: “two families share their struggles with navigating addiction treatment options.” Perversely, the article even included an embedded video that called for safer supply programs to be expanded.

I called Greg shortly after the CBC published this content, and he confirmed that, to the best of his memory, he and Amelie had told the CBC about the disastrous impacts of safer supply diversion. I later spoke with Denise in 2024, and, though she could not specifically recall what she and her daughter had told the CBC, she said she would’ve been very surprised if she had not mentioned diversion, as she had been adamantly trying to raise awareness of the issue.

Last month, the CBC’s Head of Public Affairs, Chuck Thompson, confirmed to me in an email that “in our interviews, allegations were raised about the usage of diverted safe supply.”

However, he wrote that these allegations had been omitted because: i) there was “no evidence that the drugs that killed Kamilah were from diverted safer supply,”; ii) the CBC “could not independently verify that the drugs the teenagers were using were diverted from safe supply”; and iii) the CBC’s reporting was focussed on a Coroners report showing an increase in provincial youth drug deaths, and was not about safer supply specifically.

Thompson also claimed that, “given the anecdotal reports about safe supply circulating in the fall of 2023,” Minister Whiteside had been asked to join The Current to discuss diversion and its risks to youth. He declined to clarify whether the CBC had made any attempts to engage voices or medical experts who have been critical of safer supply, and, if not, why no counterbalance was provided.

Taken together, these explanations were implausible or self-contradictory – so let’s go through them one-by-one.

Explanation 1: The CBC excluded testimony about youth accessing diverted safer supply because it could not independently confirm that Kamilah had died from diverted safer supply hydromorphone.

It is true that, in late 2022, there was some ambiguity about whether Kamilah died due to safer supply hydromorphone – in fact, the circumstances of her death actually remain contested to this day, as the BC Coroners Service inexplicably failed to follow best practices when investigating her death.

However, this was, and remains, immaterial to whether she and her friends actually consumed, and developed addictions from, diverted safer supply opioids. This information would have, by itself, been highly newsworthy even if Kamilah had died for other reasons or had not died at all. This was demonstrated by preexisting media coverage in the National Post and CTV – both media outlets reported on this story while recognizing uncertainties about Kamilah’s death, which created significant public interest and spurred vital addiction policy debates.

Explanation 2: The CBC excluded testimony about youth accessing diverted safer supply because it could not independently confirm whether the drugs used by the girls actually originated from safer supply.

Greg and Denise both confirmed to me, via phone last month, that they were unaware of any attempts by the CBC to independently verify any of the claims they had made. The CBC apparently did not request any documents (i.e. medical records) from either of them, and did not follow up with them at all after their original interviews.

I asked Thompson to confirm what attempts, if any, had been made to independently verify any of these interviewees’ claims, including those pertaining to the consumption of diverted safer supply drugs. I also asked him to address an apparent double-standard here: why was independent verification required for reporting allegations of safer supply diversion, but not for other information provided by these interviewees (i.e. statements about Kamilah and Amelie’s medical histories)?

He did not respond.

Based on the available evidence, it appears that CBC interviewed several individuals who gave inconvenient testimony about safer supply, and then declined to investigate or verify their testimony, and then used its own (wilful?) ineptitude as justification for burying the story.

Explanation 3: The CBC excluded testimony about youth accessing diverted safer supply because safer supply was not the focus of its reporting.

If this claim were true, then why did the CBC specifically ask Minister Whiteside about safer supply diversion and its impacts on youth? The organization can’t have it both ways. It can’t solicit a Minister for her thoughts on one of her own government’s signature policies, and then, when asked why opposing voices weren’t included, claim that this topic was actually out of scope. That’s dishonest.

Let’s imagine that safer supply really was out-of-scope, though. Why were Greg, Amelie, and Denise contacted for this story at all, then? They were catapulted into the national spotlight precisely because of their experiences with safer supply, so, if that element is subtracted, what differentiated them from the countless other families who could’ve spoken to youth drug deaths?

Thomson also did not respond to a request to clarify this matter.

What this all means

CBC journalists listened to a teenage girl – Amelie North – describe how diverted safer supply opioids had wreaked havoc upon her life. They listened to her mother, and the father of her deceased friend, explain how an influx of hydromorphone had harmed their families. They did this while a raucous national debate raged on about whether these types of experiences were a myth or not. And then they suppressed this testimony on highly questionable grounds.

Public broadcasters are supposed to show a commitment to the common good and political neutrality, but is the CBC taking these responsibilities seriously? When it comes to safer supply, it seems not.

The organization has, on the whole, produced ideologically-slanted coverage of the opioid crisis and behaved like a state-funded cheerleader for the harm reduction movement. Skewing stories to fit Liberal-friendly narratives is generally bad, but suppressing testimony that concerns the well-being of children is particularly concerning.

Last autumn, I released a short documentary sharing Kamilah’s story. The film – titled "Government Heroin 2: The Invisible Girls” – featured filmed interviews with Kamilah’s friends and family. It makes for a distressing and infuriating watch: it is one thing to read about the pain of a father losing his daughter to opioids; it is another thing to hear his voice break as he looks into the camera – at you – with miserable, tearful eyes.

Anyone who watches this film, and then reads or listens to the CBC’s whitewashed reporting, can see that the public broadcaster’s omissions were not just journalistic malpractice: they were morally reprehensible.

However, the CBC is a sprawling institution – while some of its divisions have produced particularly questionable reporting on this issue (CBC London, for example), there are also some bright spots here and there. The CBC’s local bureau in Ottawa, for example, has published two exposés on safer supply diversion since early last year – both of which were thoroughly researched and well-corroborated.

A few good apples aren’t enough to assuage concerns about institutional bias, though.

Last summer, Greg, Denise, and Amelie collectively filed a class action lawsuit against the B.C. and federal governments for their roles in implementing safer supply. The lawsuit alleges that both governments recklessly marketed safer supply opioids, and that they functionally condoned widespread diversion under the mistaken belief that flooding communities with pharmaceutical drugs would displace the illicit market.

Thankfully, the CBC published an accurate and balanced article on that development.

These families may yet see justice, but the fact remains that when the safer supply diversion scandal first came to light, and they, and the public more generally, needed the CBC to stand up for truth, the public broadcaster responded by censoring their testimony and withholding crucial information from the public. Canadians deserve better than this, and should demand higher journalistic standards and greater government transparency.