BIG SCOOP: A press release
Police are pushing anti-safe supply rhetoric, and most news outlets are simply parroting them
Here’s a BIG SCOOP: I read a press release.
Actually, I read two.
In the last couple weeks, two BC RCMP detachments put out news releases about drug busts in their respective jurisdictions.
First, Campbell River RCMP put out a news release, on Feb. 28, declaring a “sizeable seizure of fentanyl.” Further into the release, police claimed the seizure also included 3,500 hydromorphone pills, also known as dilaudid.
Prince George RCMP followed suit on Mar. 7, announcing “substantial seizures of prescriptions and illicit drugs.” Of those, one allegedly included 10,000 pills, including gabapentin, hydromorphone, codeine and dextroamphetamine (also known as dexedrine); and a second involved “thousands more prescription pills,” including oxycodone, morphine and hydromorphone.
Targeting safe supply
The news releases had their sights set in particular on safe supply.
“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,” said the Prince George RCMP news release, in a quote attributed to cpl. Jennifer Cooper, media relations officer.
The Campbell River RCMP release was less pointed, but noted: “Evidence was located during the search suggesting that these dilaudid pills had been diverted from safe supply prescriptions.”
Neither press release indicates what evidence suggested the prescription pills came from safe supply.
A CTV report on the Campbell River news release said the outlet asked police for more information about the evidence indicating the pills came from safe supply, and for an estimate on how many prescriptions were involved, but said it didn’t receive a response.
How much safe supply is in the supply?
And it doesn’t exactly pass the smell test.
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.”
Parroting news releases
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.
Only one — the CTV story — indicated it had questioned the RCMP on its evidence of the involvement of safe supply.
Treating allegations as fact
Police allegations and statements in nearly all of these news reports were treated as facts that scarcely, if at all, needed qualification. That includes claims fentanyl powder was “moulded into the shape of gummy bears and dinosaurs,” despite police fear mongering of fentanyl-laced candy being a well-established myth.
It’s entirely possible that in this case it is true, but the usual picture of the drug bust spoils — the table full of stacks of bills and bags and pill bottles of drugs — doesn’t seem to show these powder gummy bears.
Adam Zivo, in reporting a “BIG SCOOP” (that is, he wrote about the press releases) on both drug seizures, wrote that “safer supply hydromorphone pills, which are as potent as heroin, constituted a ‘significant’ portion of the total haul” in Prince George, but that the RCMP “was unable to say exactly how many of them had been seized, as doing so could jeopardize these investigations.”
The article doesn’t explain how that would jeopardize the investigation, leaving the impression Zivo just accepts this as true.
Drug busts as harm enforcement
None of the articles acknowledges the growing evidence that drug busts actually cause more harm by forcing drug users to seek out drugs from a supplier that’s unfamiliar to them, as well as simply causing more chaos in the overall drug supply.
As Ranger pointed out on Twitter (including a handful of the aforementioned pieces of evidence that drug busts cause harm), just a few weeks after the Campbell River drug bust, Vancouver Island Health issued an overdose advisory for the north island area.
If seizures of fentanyl cause more overdoses, it stands to reason that seizing regulated prescription drugs — whether from safe supply or other prescriptions — will cause even more damage, as those who may not have tolerance for fentanyl are now exposed to the unpredictable street supply.
Meanwhile, evidence keeps mounting that safe supply saves lives.
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.