Fentanyl: ‘The Police Can’t Arrest Their Way Out of This’
Where it's coming from, why it's so deadly, and what it will take to end the overdose crisis, according to a top Vancouver cop.
July 28, 2017
No one saw the fentanyl crisis coming—not even Bill Spearn. The staff sergeant with the Vancouver Police Department’s (VPD) organized crime section—one of the city’s highest-ranking drug enforcement officers with 21 years’ experience—started on the beat in the Downtown Eastside in 1996, but it wasn’t until 2001 that he first heard of the potent synthetic opioid. Another decade passed before the drug hit our city’s streets, and even then, he couldn’t have predicted that just a few years later fentanyl would become ubiquitous, the epicentre of an overdose epidemic that has killed more than 700 people in B.C. so far this year. And Spearn says it could get much worse before it begins to get better: “By the end of this year, it’s going to be the equivalent of a jumbo jet crashing into Vancouver,” he says. “That’s how many people are going to die.”
In an effort to learn more about the crisis in Vancouver, VanMag sat down with Spearn to find out how the VPD is tackling the organized crime behind fentanyl’s pervasive presence in the city, and the major challenges the force faces in cutting off the supply.
On his first encounters with fentanyl…
“Back in 2001 when I was with the drug squad, I remember guys from the United States telling us the worst thing you can run across was a fentanyl lab. I’d never heard of fentanyl before, and it just kind of stuck in my head that this is something I have to remember. Then, around 2010, people started telling me they were using fake Oxys with fentanyl, which I thought was ludicrous.
Organized crime is very good at developing a method of delivery for drugs that maximizes their profits, so they saw an opportunity. They started producing counterfeit OxyContin, and the active ingredient was fentanyl because they could get it for cheap.
Things really got out of control here on Thanksgiving Day of 2014. That day, I started getting phone calls from some very experienced [community members] that worked in the Downtown Eastside, telling me there was something going on. People were overdosing everywhere, specifically inside of Insite and just outside the front doors. They had 30 in a couple of hours.”
Another date that mars his calendar…
“You always talk about what’s a good day and what’s a bad day. Well, a bad day for me was December 15, 2016 when we had nine fatalities in one day. When have nine people in Vancouver ever died from anything? It’s a problem for the whole province. We are going to have 1,500 people die in B.C. this year from [fentanyl] and it’s preventable.”
On the police work that began three years ago…
“We immediately started working with Insite. We asked them for a sample of what people were using, and one of their clients surrendered a couple of origami paper flaps containing a powder. It analyzed as fentanyl and caffeine. That is the first time in my career I ever saw fentanyl.
At that point in time, we had to start targeting people who were distributing it. It was localized, we hadn’t seen that much of it. Right away, we started a couple of fentanyl projects, Project Trooper and Project Tainted. We ran two big projects out of the organized crime section, which is something we hadn’t done because they are very resource intensive. It’s hard to run two projects, big ones, at the same time but we did it. They were both very successful.”
VanMag: Project Tainted ended with 10 suspects charged (most pled guilty) and police seizing 25,000 fentanyl pills, 9.5 kilograms of crack cocaine, five kilograms of powdered cocaine, and 19.5 kilograms of marijuana and other drugs. Police also seized a pill press, four guns, seven vehicles and more than $260,000 in cash along with $1.2 million in other property. Project Trooper netted six suspects who were charged and forfeited $3 million in property, 12 guns, eight vehicles and a single room occupancy hotel, plus 25,000 fentanyl pills and 1.6 kilograms of heroin.
In January of this year, James Walter McCormick was found guilty of fentanyl trafficking after he was accused of bearing “personal significant responsibility for hundreds of fentanyl-detected deaths.” He was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
On the ongoing challenges of policing fentanyl…
“We’ve done nothing but fentanyl enforcement since 2014. Two years ago, we hoped that when we did a search, we would find fentanyl because we targeted it. Now, we expect to find it when we go through every door with a search warrant. It’s everywhere. Jump ahead to 2017, just about every drug seizure in Vancouver involves fentanyl.”
On why fentanyl has such a tight grip here…
“Obviously, China—and there is a lot of Chinese organized crime in Canada, especially in British Columbia. Organized crime is very business savvy. Fentanyl is very cheap. It’s much cheaper than heroin, so they make more money importing it and selling it as heroin. The profit margins are incredibly high.
A kilo of fentanyl on the internet being sold for $12,000 or $12,500 is enough to make a million pills that you can sell for $20 to $80 each.”
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