FENTANYL: Who Gains from all the Death?

“We are famous internationally—or, more accurately, we have become infamous—for money laundering. The sheer volume and the size of these transactions on a regular basis in casinos is just astounding.”

                                                    —David Eby, B.C. Premier

“Canada’s legal framework is designed for a domestic, rule-of-law environment. It’s ill-suited to confront global adversaries who don’t play by those rules.” 

—Cal Chrustie, former RCMP senior intelligence officer

My way of explaining the tragic cost of fentanyl begins on two different paths.

One path has US President Donald Trump in full bulldog mode, threatening tariffs on Canada if the Great White North doesn’t shore up its borders and stop the north-south flow of fentanyl into America (despite significantly more fentanyl coming south-north). 

Two, in contrast to the bluster, we zoom in on the celebrated city of Vancouver, Canada. Nestled in the corner of beautiful British Columbia, Vancouver is surrounded by majestic mountains, rain forests and the Pacific Ocean. The city is annually ranked as one of the best places in the world to live. 

But not so fast. Inside the borders of Vancouver proper lies a ten-block-corridor known as the Downtown Eastside. This battered burrow is also highly ranked as one of the most concentrated areas of mass drug addiction in North America. It is a glaring microcosm of what unfolds in cities and towns across Canada and the United States. 

To fight the physical and emotional disarray of the Downtown Eastside, hundreds of millions of tax-paying dollars for both aid and expertise have, for decades, poured into the area. Nonetheless, overdoses have increased alarmingly in recent years. There is much community and kindness in the Downtown Eastside, but to witness the disarray from the outside is to imagine what a post-apocalyptic metropolis might look like if the only food left was a pool of the most dangerous drugs on the planet. Cocaine. Crystal Meth. Heroin. And the present killer…?

Fentanyl. Mixed with whatever.

Developed in a Belgian lab in 1959, fentanyl is still regularly used for anaesthesia and pain relief. For the past few decades, fentanyl has simultaneously been a prized street drug, wreaking maximum destruction only after the Big Pharma tsunami of Oxycontin was finally strangled by an American Congress that had allowed its legal and mass distribution in the first place. With that opiate supply now limited, and countless communities decimated by opioid addiction, old and new addicts alike were jonesing for a new drug to kill the hurt. 

Enter a full invasion of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid fifty times more potent than heroin, and infinitely easier to produce and traffic.

Generally speaking, discussions about the fentanyl epidemic focus on “who loses,” most often and understandably prioritizing the addicts themselves. Pilot projects or programs are proposed. Addicts, medical professionals, on-the-ground activists, scholars, police spokespeople and government officials are brought together to debate the pros and cons of select interventions implemented to limit the medical, physical and emotional issues: do we need more or less drug legalization? More or less policing? More or less treatment centres? More or less housing? More or less government investment? These are valid questions whose answers for decades have proven to be ideologically bullied. For complex reasons, including chronic poverty and homelessness, and despite best intentions, the answers have proven palpably contentious and ineffective. 

As you will see, looking even deeper, how could they not be?

I want to ask a different question about fentanyl and its ilk. A question that is almost never asked. A question Donald Trump didn’t specifically ask, and Canada’s leaders rarely touch on, though evidence is rife. 

The answer to the question reveals hidden, murderous transnational organized crime networks (TOCs) that fuel the killing of hundreds of thousands of our sisters and brothers (disproportionately First Nations), overwhelm the justice and medical systems, sharpen social inequality and undermine Canada’s sovereignty and democratic values. These criminal organizations—sometimes backed by dictatorships with malicious interests—entangle themselves in the economy and politics of Canada (and elsewhere) at a level that pushes Canada closer to becoming its own compartmentalized, well-manicured narco state.

So no, the question is not simply, Who loses in this epidemic of drug-addicted living and dying? The question is, Who gains? 

The answer is found using a procedural approach as old as civilization: follow the money. 

For a moment, try this thought experiment. I apologize if it reads cold. Don’t think of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as a social catastrophe. Think of it is an unstoppable, super-charged economic engine that would make a Gordon Gekko capitalist blush green. How else would one describe a business enterprise that pulls in from one little, bedraggled area, hundreds of thousands of dollars of dirty money, every day? Money raised by unpaid, abused and abusing addicts via welfare cheques, petty crime and much, much worse, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Across the United States, close to a billion dollars is squeezed from the blood of drug addicts every week.

So where do these illegal dollars go? How are these billions of dirty dollars “cleaned” and deposited back into mainstream circulation? The answer is compelling, and terrifying.

To provide context to the answer, let’s begin with a few jaw-dropping facts. 

In 2017, it was estimated 97% of all fentanyl precursor chemicals that reach the West were manufactured in and shipped out of China thanks to high-tech criminal organizations and a nod and a wink from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). If that 97% number has since dropped, criminal organizations out of Iran, India and other players enthusiastically help create enough supply for any demand. 

Most of the chemicals and pill presses from China are shipped to Mexico, where brutal cartels and independent dealers refine and ship the product to the rest of North America and beyond, in ingenious ways: drug mules, U.S postal, airports, boats, you name it.

Some of this murderous cargo also enters Canada and the US through vulnerable and compromised west coast ports, from San Diego to Vancouver. In these cities, Chinese triads, the Hells Angels, Mexican cartels, South Asian gangs, Iranian and Middle Eastern criminal networks and other local dealers, lay in wait. Meanwhile, producers of fentanyl and fentanyl-laced pills work in covert labs scattered across the Fraser Valley, the interior of B.C. and beyond. Anybody fancy a trip to the Great Lakes Region?

To launder the billions of dollars of dirty money raised from drug trafficking, the criminals employ banking institutions (Toronto Dominion recently made mega-headlines for this reason), flashy casinos (the River Rock in Richmond has been a laundering force of nature in the hundreds of millions), cryptocurrencies, luxury items and the strategic purchasing of high end and low end real estate. Real estate bought to launder dirty money has played a distorted role in destroying Vancouver as a place middle-class folks can afford to live, let alone buy. It is a huge criminal problem. How huge? The money laundering technique used here by narcotic cash brokers is known world-wide as the Vancouver Model. I’m not kidding. Look it up.

Let’s move on to the illegal underground casinos found in houses bought with Canadian narco-dollars, and underground money laundering banks (look up Richmond’s now-defunct Silver International and the millions it laundered). These underground enterprises exist above ground, hinting at the syphilitic sores of a burgeoning narco state threatening to become full blown.

How is it done? Using China as the example, a Chinese citizen can take a maximum fifty-thousand dollars out of the country per year. If a citizen wants to take out, say, five hundred thousand dollars, there is a way. A visit to an underground bank and/or criminal organization in China. The aforementioned Chinese citizen deposits the $500,000 into the underground bank, and then travels to Vancouver. This underground bank makes cyber-contact with a connected narco-criminal organization in Vancouver. The criminal organization in Vancouver packs up a bag of money gathered from addicts on the Downtown Eastside et al, and delivers that bag to, for example, a parking lot at the River Rock Casino in Richmond. The Chinese citizen is waiting. The Chinese citizen is given the bag, filled generally in stacked twenty dollar bills, minus a percentage of the cost of doing business. The Chinese citizen brings the bag of cash to the casino, and buys hundreds of thousands in gambling chips. Voila, the money is now laundered. The big gambler—known as a whale—plays a few hands and cashes out. Another degree further laundered. Physical money never crosses the Pacific Ocean. This is a big aspect of the Vancouver Model.

Hell, in British Columbia, a billion dollars a year in the form of taxes funnels back from casinos into government coffers. Who can say no, despite a significant portion of that pay-out coming from laundered drug money, injected back into pot holes on the Downtown Eastside and a desperate universal health care system? The Robin Hood ghost of Pablo Escobar lives. The money is useful. The irony is sickening. We creep closer to a narco state.

The answer to the question, Who gains in this war-by-other-means? is what I’ve tried to clarify here for people like myself who, before a research deep dive, knew next to nothing about this deadly state of play. What I’ve learned is a wake up call, a scream, a revelation, a call to action to non-partisan leaders—in other words, leaders with moral integrity—to stop this murderous web of violent, high-tech, local and transnational corruption. This “business” where profit-at-all-cost is God, and the collective death of countless people, not to mention the rule of law and democracy, are nothing more than what economists call an externality—an unfortunate by-product of business as usual. 

This deadly, cold-hearted business must be revealed, and stopped.

For anybody who cares about our children now, or the future of democracy, an informed call to action cannot be made soon enough.