Slim but encouraging signs of hope as BC's overdose emergency enters its ninth year

Targeted shootings have declined, overdose death rates are down, but organized crime is as strong as ever, and public understanding of addiction and treatment is low

Tequel Willis was only 14 when he was shot down in a targeted killing in 2020. His murder remains unsolved. His picture is held by his mother, Tiffany Willis (left), and his great-aunt, Evangeline Downey. He is the youngest known victim of BC’s endless gang-related killings.

The rattle of gunfire December 17 that seriously injured – but did not kill -- two Surrey parents while their child sat in a nearby car struck a strangely hopeful note as BC’s toxic drug overdose crisis enters its ninth year.

Mercifully, no one died that evening in Surrey, no child was orphaned. Nor was anyone injured two days earlier, a few blocks away, where police reported shooters at work. For whatever reason, targeted shootings are below 2022’s terrible levels, although about one in five murders is gang-related, and the killers keep trying.

That’s not all.

Overdose deaths have stopped rising and even declined eight per cent in British Columbia from last year’s high. RCMP investigators have shut down several superlabs, including the largest in Canada’s history, and Canada, now under Donald Trump’s whip, may finally be tackling money-laundering.

In these dark times, these all count as hopeful news.

Of course, both Surrey shootings could easily have gone the other way, taking multiple lives. Statistics Canada reported December 11 that British Columbia registered 123 homicides in 2023, down from a record 155 in 2022. (Statscan is a year behind in its homicide tallies. This year kicked off with a spate of killings, as reported by Lotusland here.)

The decline in overdose deaths reduced the average daily toll to five from six.

Why the drop in deaths and killings? Answers are elusive and necessarily speculative.

A year-end review by Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, an RCMP agency, shows little room for complacency. British Columbia remains second only to Ontario in terms of organized crime groups, hosting 200 of the 668 organizations assessed by CISC in this year’s report, including five of the seven “high level threats.” The major networks are focusing more on fentanyl, becoming more diversified, manufacturing more of their own supply and steadily increasing exports.

In addition, CISC reports a small but disturbing increase in human trafficking, up four per cent since 2020. “Canada is now a source, transit and destination country for traffickers,” the report says, with “indigenous youth and 2SLGBTQI+ individuals most often targeted.”

The RCMP refuses to categorize the largest organizations as “gangs,” insisting that “organized crime groups are not bound by geographic location or ethnic origins. Criminal organizations are mostly diverse and involved in multiple markets, making it increasingly important to assess organized crime by its impact through co-operative transnational networks.”

Last year’s CISC report concluded just “three organized crime groups and three individuals are assessed as key suppliers in the illicit fentanyl market.” They collaborate to keep the toxic drug supply chain humming and are only temporarily disrupted by the loss of a superlab. It is these organizations, not the minimal supplies of prescribed “safer supply,” that are driving the overdose crisis.

The recent string of RCMP enforcement successes should not distract Solicitor General Garry Begg from the dramatic changes necessary to make a real impact on these groups, which were outlined in a scathing assessment prepared for his predecessor, Mike Farnworth. Farnworth had barely begun the work when the provincial election intervened.

That vote laid bare a broad new consensus among British Columbians that harm reduction measures had reached their limit and more was required both on enforcement and treatment. Premier David Eby responded forcefully on both fronts, rolling back decriminalization and pledging an increase in involuntary care. He later eliminated the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions, rolling it back into the Ministry of Health.

What remains completely missing in the response to the toxic drug crisis is a comprehensive theory of addiction, its roots and appropriate responses.

Yet Lotusland reported exactly such a made-in BC theory in one of our first pieces, which became one of the most-read since the blog was launched.

In “Rat Park, the BC ‘morphine on demand’ experiment that upended addiction theory,” we explored the pioneering work of SFU psychologist Bruce Alexander, whose dislocation theory of addiction goes a long way to explaining why British Columbians are uniquely vulnerable to addiction and substance use disorders of all types.

It’s not just because we have port cities, although we do. The roots of addiction can be found in dislocation, pain, trauma and all the social determinants of health, including poverty, lack of housing and income inequality. It will be impossible to make progress until these realities are acknowledged.

It is this massive market, believed to number more than 200,000 British Columbians with opiate use disorders alone, that organized crime is supplying with increasingly toxic substances. (Of course, regulated addictive substances like tobacco and alcohol take their own terrifying toll.)

Meanwhile, the CISC reports, a new generation of criminal chemists is tirelessly pursuing the next fentanyl, experimenting with even more potent alternatives like nitazene and medetomidine.

A new reckoning with the realities of the roots of addiction must include a critical look at the enormous public misunderstandings about treatment, its possibilities and its limitations. Former Provincial Health Officer Perry Kendall has called for an end to the sterile debates between harm reduction advocates and those insisting on abstinence. The stakes are too high for that.

If 2025 brings new public understanding of the difficulties of treatment and the realities of relapse, that alone would be a major step forward.

At the same time, government should shine a light on the performance of BC’s private treatment sector, which remains largely unregulated. The fraud, misery and corruption that can result is starkly illustrated in a new investigative series in the Toronto Star. The headline tells the story: “Fake nurses. No doctor on site. Staff who like to party. The inside story of this ‘luxury’ Muskoka addiction rehab.” It’s hard to believe such stories could not be written about some treatment facilities in this province.

The signs of hope are there, if only in the fact that the overdose crisis and its attendant crime and disorder, were a key issue in the election. Whether leadership can be found to turn these hopeful signs into a trend remains to be seen.