A Prince George RCMP press release kicks of a political football

And conservation officers are burnt-out on bear calls. Plus, letters!

Last Thursday, the Prince George RCMP put out news release that would spark multiple days of political debate from B.C. to Alberta to Ottawa. In light of that, it’s worth sharing it here in full (bolded text is mine):

Over the past three months, Prince George RCMP’s Street Crew Unit has led multiple investigations targeting individuals and groups involved in trafficking drugs in Prince George.

Controlled Drugs and Substance Act search warrants have been executed in various residences throughout the city, resulting in substantial seizures of illicit and prescription drugs, as well as cash.

One investigation resulted in the seizure of more than 10,000 individual pills, including Gabapentin, Hydromorphone, Codeine and Dextroamphetamine. In addition to the prescription drugs, investigators also seized large quantities of suspected fentanyl, cocaine, and methamphetamine.

A second investigation resulted in seizures of over two kilograms of suspected cocaine and methamphetamine, and more cash. Investigators also seized thousands more prescription pills, including Oxycodone, Morphine and more Hydromorphone.

Click here to see a larger photo of the prescription pills seized during one investigation, laid out on a table in individual evidence bags.

Morphine and Hydromorphone (also known as Dilaudid) are safe supply prescription drugs.

We have noted an alarming trend over the last year in the amount prescription drugs located during drug trafficking investigations, noting they are being used as a form of currency to purchase more potent, illicit street drugs. Organized crime groups are actively involved in the redistribution of safe supply and prescription drugs, some of which are then moved out of British Columbia and resold. The reselling of prescription drugs significantly increases the profits realized by Organized Crime, states Cpl. Jennifer Cooper, Media Relations Officer for the Prince George RCMP.

Police are warning the public that the misuse of prescription medication by anyone is extremely dangerous.

Prince George RCMP encourages the public to report any suspicious activity in their area.

If you have any information about this or any other criminal offence, please contact the Prince George RCMP at (250)561-3300 or anonymously contact Crime Stoppers at 1(800)222-8477 or online at www.northernbccrimestoppers.ca (English only). You do not have to reveal your identity to Crime Stoppers. If you provide information that leads to an arrest or recovery of stolen property, you could be eligible for a cash reward.

In a follow-up interview with CBC News, Cpl. Cooper went into more detail about why safer supply was mentioned in these release. Here is a portion of that:

Cooper: “Yeah, our street crew unit has been focusing on individuals and organized crime groups that have been purchasing prescription medication, some of which is designated safe, supply prescription medication from its intended users and then taking those prescription medications and reselling them interprovincially.”

CBC: My question is, how do we know that they're intended for safe supply?

Cooper: From the way we find them and when we complete our search warrants, we're finding these drugs not in the hands of the intended users.

CBC: OK, so like they've got somebody's name on them if they're a certain pill, but they're not in that user's hands. Is there a way to tell that they're safe supply as opposed to just prescription?

Cooper: In our work with our contacts at Northern Health, we've been told that morphine and hydromorphone are designated safe supply prescription drugs and just the people for whom these drugs were intended to, we know that they were likely safe supply.

CBC: It sounds like you know this process where organized crime purchases these drugs. I guess what's the motivation behind that for them?

Cooper: They can move these prescription drugs, especially ones that are designated safe supply to provinces that do not have safe supply, and then resell them, potentially using the misinformation that they are safe drugs to use because they are designated safe supply and sell them at a higher price than what they purchase them for.

Then, this happened:

And this:

The above release from Alberta premier Danielle Smith included this:

With the serious concern of diversion becoming evident and the reality that these drugs may be ending up for resale in Alberta, I have asked Deputy Premier and Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Services Mike Ellis, and Minister of Mental Health and Addiction Dan Williams, to request an emergency meeting with their counterparts in British Columbia to stop the flow of these high-potency opioids to Alberta.

And indeed, that’s what Cpl. Cooper said in her interview:

They can move these prescription drugs, especially ones that are designated safe supply to provinces that do not have safe supply, and then resell them..

But elsewhere, questions were being raised about the extent of the problem. Here’s reporter Dustin Godfrey, who has done a lot of work on the issue of the toxic drug crisis, in his Monday morning dispatch:

If the evidence is simply that they came in prescription bottles, I have news for them: prescription hydromorphone has been diverted to the streets since long before it became prevalent as a safe supply option. In 2018/19, there were more than 80,000 people receiving prescriptions for the drug, according to that fiscal year’s British Columbia Controlled Prescription Drug Atlas. (There isn’t a more recent equivalent report published online.)

Safe supply opioid medications, including hydromorphone, declined from just over 5,000 in March last year to just over 4,300 in September, according to Corey Ranger, president of the Harm Reduction Nurses Association, who has been tracking the figures as they are released by the province. According to a Prince George Citizen report on the police news release there, that figure had dropped even further to 4,212.

Given that, it beggars belief that nearly that many pills from safe supply are being found in multiple individual drug busts in different areas of the province.

As harm reduction worker Juls Budau, who used to work in Prince George, noted in a later CBC article, “it’s fuelling a misinformation campaign.”

"These pills have been trafficked for decades. The fact that they're calling them safe supply pills is a bit troubling,” she told the CBC, adding that the seizures are “just used to diminish a program that we all said isn't enough from the beginning.”

(There’s much more to his article, if you’d like to read it, but we must move on)

As local MP Todd Doherty joined the calls to end safe supply yesterday morning, B.C. Premier David Eby was asked about the calls. He said he had requested a meeting with RCMP to get a fuller picture of the story behind the Prince George RCMP press release. After reitirating why he supports safer supply as a way to save lives, alongside treatment programs, he went on to say:

That doesn’t mean that we would accept diversion of these drugs that could put other communities and other individuals at risk…

We will ask or have asked through staff for a briefing from E-Division (the B.C. RCMP division) about what they found at the Prince George arrest… but if there are any issues that we can identify from that information from police we will take action.

I had a conversation with the premier of Alberta about her concerns and I made a committment to her that we’re happy to meet with her to receive any information or evidence that they have about diversion.

And by Monday afternoon, this had come from the RCMP’s head office in B.C.:

The BC RCMP conducts thousands of drug trafficking investigations every year leading to the seizure of illicit, unregulated and prescription drugs.

The seizure of prescription drugs, such as narcotics and opioids, that are no longer in the possession of their prescribed owner is something the police have had to deal with on many occasions. However, the presence of confirmed safer supply prescriptions are in the minority of drug seizures. While there have been recent investigations that have resulted in notable quantities being seized, there is currently no evidence to support a widespread diversion of safer supply drugs in the illicit market in BC or Canada.

We’ve increased awareness to our police officers in order to better identify cases where safer supply drugs may be present within their investigations.

We are continuing to work with our partners in order to test seized drugs, in order to both definitively confirm and source them. We are committed to working with local, provincial and national agencies with respect to all drug-related crimes.

As noted by the Canadian Press, the RCMP declined any followup interviews.

The above statement, from Assistant Commissioner John Brewer, does not outright contradict the majority of the Prince George RCMP release. Indeed, it confirms, “there have been recent investigations that have resulted in notable quantities being seized…” However, the key reason for the clarification is likely the second half of that sentence, which ends with “there is currently no evidence to support a widespread diversion of safer supply drugs in the illicit market in BC or Canada.” That context was not present in the Prince George RCMP’s initial release which instead described the issue as an “alarming trend”

We have noted an alarming trend over the last year in the amount prescription drugs located during drug trafficking investigations, noting they are being used as a form of currency to purchase more potent, illicit street drugs. Organized crime groups are actively involved in the redistribution of safe supply and prescription drugs, some of which are then moved out of British Columbia and resold.

The question, I suppose, becomes what constitutes “an alarming trend.” That initial Prince George RCMP release had no context around how many of those drugs were diverted safe supply, nor what constitutes an alarming trend especially in the context of a drug poisoning crisis that has killed thousands. Those questions still haven’t actually been answered, but the provincial office is signficantly downplaying the language of the former. But that’s not before both Poilievre — largely touted to be the next Prime Minister of Canada — and Smith — currently the premier of Alberta — used the non-contextualized information as a platform to promise to end the safer supply program altogether. The genie is out of the bottle, as it were.

With all that in mind, I also want to back to Dustin Godfrey’s post, in which he talks about how the majority of media treated this release:

Between five news stories I found reporting on the Campbell River drug seizures and four on the Prince George seizures, there were only six sentences with information sourced from somewhere other than police and one quote from a non-police source, most of which came from a CTV story on the former seizure. (This analysis doesn’t include broader articles that reported on both seizures.)

By contrast, I found 47 sentences that were either copy-pasted wholesale from police news releases or had only a few words edited, along with another 14 instances where the press releases were quoted. One of the lightly edited copy-pastes included removing “suspected” when referring to the drugs reportedly seized, assuming even less doubt than the police news release the report was about.

In a Prince George Citizen report — the first of two reporting on the news release — every sentence was either lifted entirely from the press release, or was lightly edited. That includes taking a 76-word quote from an officer, replacing the word “we” with “RCMP” and publishing it without quotation marks.

…

Police relationships with moral panics are cyclical — or as one paper put it, mutually reinforcing. Moral panics, which most often result in harm to poor communities of colour, “serve to justify increasingly repressive police practices,” which in turn reinforce the demonization of the already demonized.

Journalists shouldn’t be stenographers for police in the best of times. Even less so when their press releases serve prohibitionist rhetoric that happen to align with harsher policing and beefing up police budgets. And less still if the police actions are associated with higher risks of people dying.

Coincidentally, as I was writing the above, Prince George RCMP Supt. Shaun Wright was giving his year-in-review 2023 report to council and he specifically cited drug seizures as indicative of what he again described as a trend of prescription medication and diverted safe supply being used by traffickers in the city. After another two hours of discussion about other issues, councillor Kyle Sampson asked him to comment on the B.C. RCMP release, and how it compares to what is being seen in Prince George.

Wright said he wouldn’t want to contradict the B.C. RCMP and that he doesn’t have access to overall statistics but, “We have had a number of seizures of what I would consider significant quantities of prescription drugs that I would believe to be diverted from that program” (referring to safe supply) and “to me, subjectively, it seems to be increasing,” though he acknowledged he might just be more aware of it.

Sampson responded by saying he doesn’t want to share his own thoughts on safer supply but heavily implied he had them and they weren’t good saying he was upset politics were getting in the way of facts on the ground. I suppose a lot of people are, but everyone has a different idea of who is playing politics and who is dealing in the world of facts and evidence.

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RCMP police report: There are bears

Listen, the police report went until well after 8 and I wasn’t able to watch it all. I’ll go back and listen to some key parts, I think, but the other messages in the report were:

• Case counts down overall;

• Encampment is dangerous — a fatal shooting, other violent attacks — B.C. Ambulance won’t go in without an escort;

• “Violent gangs pushing up from the Lower Mainland” over the last year and a half;

• Downtown disturbances in connection to mental health and addiction remain an issue;

• Having additional officers and more cooperation with other agencies is helping — they are seeing repeat offenders get treatment, stay in custody more, reducing the overall amount of time spent on dealing with them;

• 2024 is anticipated to be the launch of even more partnerships with health groups providing mental health supports, reducing the number of calls police have to deal with that could be more appropriately handled by another agency;

• Worries were expressed about new supportive housing projects being set up in old motels in town as potential sites of crime — with the note that the majority of people accessing supportive housing are not involved. Kyle Sampson later expressed some alarm/anger that apparently people from other parts of the province may access this supportive housing and he questions why the city is contributing to their costs if that’s the case;

• “Youth stabbings” — no real elaboration, unclear if this is another alarming trend;

• Likewise, a “signficant proliferation” of 3D printed guns. Unclear what “signficiant proliferation” entails;

• The number of calls for bears was taking a lot of time — RCMP are glad to see more enforcement of garbage bylaws and would support bear-proof containers.

On that last point, conservation officer Eamon McArthur took over the presentation, saying he’s been on the job for ten+ years and he has never seen a summer like the one we just had in terms of the number of bears in the city.

“In August of 2022 there were approximately 145 calls for service in the Prince George area… in August 2023, there were over 3,000.”

He says there are lots of potential causes, from drought to fires to climate change, but he wanted to focus on what Prince George, the city, can control: Attractants. He says they did a survey of neighbourhoods with a high number of calls and saw “street after street” of ornamental fruit trees.

The huge number of calls apparently led to burnout among conservation officers, especially newer staff.

On the secure garbage cans, McArthur said a pilot program in the Hart found that the bins they tried out “did not work well over the winter” because the mechanism keeping them closed froze, and then collection didn’t work. He’s looking at other options and forwarding them to the city.

To conclude, McArthur says he hopes he is wrong, but he expects another bad year ahead.

This took me to 8 p.m. so I tapped out of the rest of council meeting! Will have more throughout the week, I’m sure.

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The mayor isn’t spending any money on meals

For the second month in a row, the mayor’s monthly expense report showed him spending zero dollars. Councillor Tim Bennett asked him if he is doing the work he needs to be doing, and Yu said his activity level is about the same but he’s spending his own money on meals, etc rather than charging it to taxpayers.

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Letters:

On Hell Yeah PG, some comments. 4streegrrl writes:

It can be great in its authenticity, and it can also be a version of the prosperity gospel. I'll leave it at that because the time change happened again and I need more coffee and it is still dark. Dammit, John Horgan!!!

Bailey responds:

we definitely have to be careful with the gospel of HYPG - and reflect on who the group serves, the voices the exclude, and the community it does foster.

And Jo opines:

As someone who moved to PG less than 2 years ago, I've had to adapt to how much this town runs on Facebook. Compared to previous places I've lived, most businesses and events here are all very centered around this platform. As a millennial, before I moved here I only used Facebook when I needed to buy or sell something on Marketplace. It was something my parent's generation still uses regularly, but I didn't know anyone else who used it regularly in my age demographic before moving here. This recent Walrus article rang true to me: https://thewalrus.ca/the-north-runs-on-facebook/

And Beth suggests:

Reading the heading about Prince George Advocacy Week in Victoria, after the story about HYPG, my brain went to events we have attended, or heard about, in other places where Canadians get together to chat and enjoy being Canadian. I believe most of us know folks who moved to Victoria from Prince George. How about a Pub Night (or coffee shop get together) with ex-PGers - to help them connect and maybe be part of the Prince George Advocacy Process.....or maybe just have fun as community?

On the topic of Cinema CNC’s return, Torie says:

I am SOOOOOOO HAPPY that the Cinema CNC fest is coming back! The event getting cancelled in 2020 was when I first realized that the pandemic was gonna actually be a thing and I was very bummed (I think I still have my ticket book somewhere...). Peter Maides deserves so many more accolades than he gets for his work bringing incredible film to PG. His passion and giddy excitement about all things film is infectious and is such a gift to this community. I've been going to movies at CNC and the annual film fest since I was a teenager and these events were essential in shaping my tastes as a teen and a burgeoning cinephile. Before the days of streaming services and internet databases, I relied on Cinema CNC and the movie section at the college library to open my mind and show me a world of film I never would have had access to living in PG. SUPPORT INDEPENDENT FILM!!! LONG LIVE CINEMA CNC!

And Brianna writes about some other local enterainment:

if you were interested in giving it a shoutout today, Unbcmp has their production of Cry-Baby opening this Thursday at Theatre Northwest.

A good friend of mine is acting in it, so I wanna support any way I can :)

News roundup:

• How the time is changed on Prince George’s largest clock.

• One more police item — RCMP are investigating two suspcious deaths from over the weekend.

• Buy-Low Foods pushing for early spring opening at Parkwood Place.

• Old growth forests still being logged for pellets, conservation advocates say.

• A Call to Action to Save BC’s Forest Sector.

• Watch out for undercover teenagers: Prince George Boston Pizza fined $7,000 for serving liquor to minor.

• Building beyond regulations: Accessibility chair ensures lasting accessibility after the Para Nordic Games.

• Longtime PG Ringette coach takes home Presidents Award.

• UNBC Athlete starts new business selling women’s sports apparel.

• Spruce Kings alumni game set for this Saturday afternoon.

• It’s social work week in Prince George.

• 46th annual Central Interior Science Exhibition held at UNBC.

• When do the golf courses open?

Today’s song:

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