“Government Heroin” documentary exposes rampant safer supply fraud

There is no substitute for hearing testimony with your own ears and eyes.

By Adam Zivo

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

While many written accounts of safer supply fraud have been published in the Canadian media, this documentary provides, for the first time, an extended interview with a former addict who openly describes his own use of these diverted drugs. It is one thing to read these stories, and altogether another to watch and listen to them – so perhaps this will help dispel the myths that have been pushed, rather aggressively, by the harm reduction movement.

In the film, Callum explains how, three years ago, a friend informed him that drug users in the city were receiving “insane” amounts of free safer supply drugs – predominantly hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin. While these drugs are meant to wean addicts off riskier street substances, the friend explained that recipients mostly sell their safer supply at bargain prices so they can procure stronger substances, such as illicit fentanyl.

At first, Callum thought this was a joke. He had been struggling with a moderate addiction to pharmaceutical opioids – mostly oxycodone and Percocet – but, as these pills were expensive and hard to find, his drug use remained stable. The idea that the government was showering individuals with hundreds of powerful opioid pills a month, for free and with essentially no supervision, seemed “almost like a dream for a drug addict.”

But then he connected with some safer supply clients and realized that everything that he had heard was true. Fueled by a near-limitless supply of dirt-cheap opioids, Callum’s drug use rapidly spun out of control and, for two years, his life fell into utter disarray. Although he went to rehab last year, he says that his mind remains muddled by the aftereffects of these drugs to this day.

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

It was obvious to Callum that these pills were not counterfeit, given their quality and consistency and the fact that they typically came in their original, labelled prescription bottles: “Usually the people I was buying them from would try to scratch out the doctor’s name or their name. They were kind of paranoid about that. But sometimes they would just give it to me with the label unripped, not covered with marker or anything.”

Callum estimates that 90 percent of the safer supply clients he interacted with were diverting their drugs – a figure that is fairly consistent with estimates provided by former drug users I interviewed in London last year, who typically placed the diversion rate among their circles at around 80 percent.

Callum also believes that organized crime is involved in the trafficking of these drugs, and recalled how one higher-level dealer said that he would drive to northern Ontario, where safer supply is essentially unavailable, with thousands of pills stowed in his trunk to resell at a significant profit.

While I was unable to independently verify Callum’s claim about intraprovincial trafficking, his testimony is consistent with information provided to me earlier this year by Michael Tibollo, Ontario’s Associate Minister of Mental Health and Addictions, who said that, based on certain police reports and epidemiological data, it is clear that there is a particular problem with safer supply drugs being trafficked from London to northern Ontario.

Callum was able to corroborate the general contours of his story by providing dozens of screenshots of time-stamped text conversations between himself and his former dealers (some of which appear in the documentary), as well as excerpts of his medical records indicating that he had been diagnosed with severe opioid use disorder and had been “buying safer supply from friends.”

He also called a safer supply patient whom he used to purchase drugs from, and, while I listened in, had her confirm that she had hundreds of pills ready to sell and could introduce him to a safer supply doctor if he wanted to get on the program. A video recording of this conversation was originally meant to be included in the documentary, but was cut to mitigate risk of retaliation.

Finally, Callum’s mother, a registered nurse, appears in the documentary and recounts finding safer supply prescription bottles in her son’s room on the day he went to rehab.

As public scrutiny of safer supply has increased over the past year, providers have insisted that they are closely monitoring diversion through urine testing. Yet Callum says that the clients he interacted with would occasionally, in the process of selling their drugs, withhold a few of their pills and openly admit to him that they needed these small amounts to pass their tests.

“(They) would also take one or two pills the night before they get their prescription, so that it looks like it’s in their system. It shows up on the urine tests. So they would use that to pass the urine tests, so that they would get another script the next week,” he says in the film.

The exploitation of this loophole was confirmed by Dr. Janel Gracey, an addiction physician who treated Callum and who is also featured in my documentary. She says that “it is known in the addiction world that urine testing is not effective at catching diversion” because such tests only measure the presence of a drug, not its quantity. A safer supply patient can divert almost all of their drugs and still pass their urine tests, she says, so long as they take just one pill before giving their samples.

Gracey characterizes Canada’s current safer supply system as an underregulated “free for all” that destabilizes patients while allowing some pharmacists and physicians to reap considerable profits. “I know people on the safer supply program that have never even used fentanyl, and that’s the whole point of the program: to get them off the fentanyl. So they’re just lining up and getting a bunch of (hydromorphone), really, for no reason,” she says.

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

“We are seeing younger and younger patients come in, unfortunately. Fifteen (and) 16-year-olds coming in, and they’re getting hooked on (hydromorphone) because it’s so incredibly cheap. It’s cheaper than alcohol,” she says. “We do get a few coming in that are there because of fentanyl use, but usually even the (young fentanyl users) started with (hydromorphone).”

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

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This article was originally published in The Bureau, a Canadian media outlet that investigates the intersections of organized crime, drug trafficking and foreign interference.