FENTANYL: Who Gains from all this 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

“Canada has excellent criminal intelligence. But what RCMP and CSIs know about the CCP’s collusion with the Big Circle Boys and Chil Lop Tse’s super cartel never make it to trial.”

—Sam Cooper, journalist and author, Wilful Blindness

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

One path has US President Donald Trump in full bulldog, threatening punitive tariffs on Canada if the Great White North doesn’t shore up its borders and stop the flow of fentanyl from here into America. 

Two, in contrast to the bluster, we zoom in on the celebrated city of Vancouver, Canada, my hometown. 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 ten 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. To witness the Downtown Eastside is to get a vision of 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 king killer…?

Fentanyl. Mixed with whatever.

Developed in 1959, fentanyl is to this day regularly used in anaesthesia and as a frontline painkiller. Fentanyl has also been a street drug for decades. But as a street drug, fentanyl brings maximum destruction only after the Big Pharma tsunami of Oxycontin—from Purdue Pharma mostly—is finally stopped by massive lawsuits and public outrage. With that opiate supply now limited, and countless communities decimated by opioid addiction, old and new addicts alike are jonesing for a new drug to kill the hurt.  This outcome is unintended but predictable—and celebrated by narco-traffickers everywhere. It has a name: The Iron Law of Prohibition. By not managing the removal of an addictive drug, the void is filled with something worse.

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

Most discussions about the fentanyl epidemic key on “who loses?” in this horrific scourge; the desperate addicts, struggling tax-payers footing the bill, handcuffed police forces, overwhelmed justice systems and so on. Most proposals focus on drug addicts and gathering politicians, activists, addicts, police chiefs and government officials to debate the pros and cons of select interventions implemented to limit the carnage: do we need more or less drug legalization? More or less policing? More or less housing? More or less government investment? These are valid questions whose answers for decades have proven to be ideologically led, and for complex reasons and despite good intentions, palpably contentious and insufficient.

As you will see, 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 the evidence is rife. A question whose answer reveals a (not so) hidden, murderous transnational network of criminal organizations that fuels the killing of hundreds of thousands of our sisters and brothers (disproportionately First Nations), overwhelms the justice and medical systems, sharpens social inequality and undermines Canada’s sovereignty and democratic values. Sometimes implicitly backed by dictatorships, these criminal organizations relentlessly entangle themselves in the economy at a level that pushes Canada closer to becoming its own compartmentalized, well-manicured narco state.

So no, the question of our time is not simply, Who loses in this epidemic of drug-addicted death? 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. Don’t think of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as a social catastrophe with many great people trying to make it better. Think of it instead as an unstoppable, super-charged economic engine that would make any Gordon Gekko capitalist blush green. I apologize if this seems cold, but how else would you describe a business 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, breaking and entering, and much, much worse (drug-dealing and sex work), 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? That is seldom asked. How are these billions of dirty dollars “cleaned” and deposited back into mainstream circulation? The answers are compelling and terrifying.

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

In 2017, it was estimated 97% of all fentanyl precursor chemicals were manufactured in and shipped out of China thanks to massive criminal organizations and a wink (and subsidies and/or other incentives) from the Chinese Communist Party.

Oh, and if that 97% number has since dropped, criminal organizations out of India, the Middle East (Iran), and other players enthusiastically create supply for any demand. 

Most of the chemicals and pill presses from China are shipped to Mexico, where major cartels and independent dealers find ingenious ways to refine and ship the product to the rest of North America and beyond: drug mules, U.S postal, airports, 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, 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 drugs are scattered in secret labs all across the Fraser Valley, the interior of the province 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), flashy casinos (the River Rock Casino in Richmond has been a laundering force of nature), and the strategic purchasing of high end and low end real estate and luxury goods. These massive real estate purchases have, over decades, helped price out the new middle-class from even living in Vancouver, let alone owning a house. To hammer home the degree of criminal actvity, the style of money laundering used here in Vancouver is known world-wide as the Vancouver Model. I’m not kidding.

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 Silver International and the billions 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 this laundering done? Using China as the best example—because it is—a Chinese citizen can take a maximum $50,000 out of the country per year. If that citizen wants to take out, say, $500,000, there is a way. A visit to an “underground” bank in China. The fella deposits the five hundred grand into the underground bank, and hops a plane to Vancouver. This underground bank in China makes cyber-contact with a connected narco-criminal organization in Vancouver. That criminal organization fills a hockey bag with money gathered from desperate addicts on the Downtown Eastside (or wherever), and delivers that bag to, for example, a parking lot at the River Rock Casino in Richmond. The Chinese citizen gets a bag filled with close to $500,000 of dirty money, minus a percentage of the cost of business. It’s baccarat time. The Chinese citizen (possibly with a Canadian passport) walks into the casino, and buys hundreds of thousands in gambling chips. Voila, the money is laundered. The high-rolling gambler—known as a whale—plays a few hands and cashes out. Now it’s even cleaner. Physical money never crosses the Pacific Ocean. This is the Vancouver Model.

With casinos in British Columbia, something like a billion dollars a year funnels back legally 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.

So the answer to the question, Who gains in this war-by-other-means? is what I’ve tried to clarify for people like myself who, before a research deep dive, knew next to nothing about this deadly state of play. Thank you to journalists like Sam Cooper and many others—RCMP officers, many writers and filmmakers, American and Canadian government papers/pdfs, activists, legal cases etc., for the real work—and often significant courage. Also, I want to be crystal clear here: when we talk of China exporting fentanyl precursors or the Chinese Communist Party etc., this has nothing to do with our Asian-Canadian sisters and brothers. They should not be linked in any way, anymore than a South Asian Canadian should be linked to South Asian gangs or a European Canadian to the Hells Angels. That would be preposterous. We are Canadian, and in this fight together.

As for narco-trafficking, money laundering and foreign interference in Canada? What I’ve learned is a wake up 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-heartened business must be revealed, and stopped. If politicians won’t do it, and the R.C.M.P. and the law courts can’t do it, maybe public outrage is the needed catalyst.

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

Selected Further reading:

Sam Cooper: Wilful Blindness: How a Criminal Network of Narcos, Tycoons and CCP Agents Infiltrated the West

Sam Cooper: The Bureau

Ben Westhoff: Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic

Scott McGregor, Ina Mitchell: The Mosaic Effect: How the Chinese Communist Party Started a Hybrid War in America’s Backyard

Gary Clement: Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and the R.C.M.P.

The Cullen Commision: Commission of Inquiry Into Money Laundering in British Columbia

Peter German: Dirty Money

Cal Chrustie: MLI: Hybrid threats, broken borders, and organized chaos—transnational organized crime in Canada: Inside Policy Q&A with Cal Chrustie