It’s a common refrain—an ever-turning carousel of George Bush “Mission Accomplished” gifs.
"Every day in British Columbia, more people die and new people become addicted to illicit drugs that are manufactured and trafficked by organized crime groups that operate in plain sight,” reads one VPD officer’s quote in a news release, reported in mid-April uncritically by local media. “While the results of this investigation are impressive, there is much more work that needs to be done to address BC’s overdose crisis and the criminals that profit from it.”
“This seizure has disrupted business for a criminal organization and made life a bit safer for people struggling with illicit substance use,” another VPD officer is quoted as saying in a December news release, again reported uncritically by the media.
“A seizure of this size will undoubtedly reduce the amount of fentanyl and other illicit drugs sold on the streets,” that same officer is quoted as saying in yet another unquestioning report from July last year.
But it’s not just cops: “Anything that we can do to separate people from the toxic drugs that are killing them is important, including getting between those individuals and drug traffickers who may be connected to organized crime who are preying on vulnerable people.”
That quote is from Jennifer Whiteside, the mental health and addictions minister, in a May 25 CTV News article following another big drug bust.
Surely it’s true, right? It only stands to reason that taking drugs off the streets will lead to fewer people accessing drugs. Right?
Right?
As researcher Alex Betsos noted in a recent tweet, it’s certainly intuitive—but it falls into what Sanho Tree once described to Betsos as a sort of finger trap.
The American Journal of Public Health recently published a study showing police drug seizures actually are associated with negative health outcomes.
To be fully clear at the outset: This study doesn’t purport to draw a causal link. But more on that later.
What the study says
The study looked at two years of data in Marion County, Indiana. The county, with a population of nearly a million people, is the home to the state capital, Indianapolis, and accounts for about a quarter of the state’s overdose deaths, according to the study.
It honed in on three data sources: Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department drug seizure data, coroners’ fatal overdose stats and EMS nonfatal overdose stats, including calls for service and naloxone administration.
Just to quickly note: the drug seizures mentioned in the quotes at the top of this story are all from big, dramatic drug stings with names like Operation Torque or Operation Tint or what have you. The seizures come with images of guns, bills and baggies of drugs marked “evidence” on a table. It’s a well-documented phenomenon.
But when this study notes that there were 4.2 drug seizures per day over the two-year study period (adding up to over 3,000 seizures), this likely doesn’t just reference large-scale drug busts. It’s more likely low amounts taken from street-level dealers or from the drug users themselves (mind you: street-level dealers are very frequently drug users who participate in the trade to pay for their drugs).
But the reasons and the sentiments are the same: separate the users from the drugs. The logic may, while certainly still flawed, seem more intuitive when targeting high-level distributors—fewer drugs making it onto the street in the first place. But confiscating drugs from drug users themselves takes minimal consideration to realize how poorly this rationale pans out. What is taking drugs from a drug user supposed to do but force them to go find more drugs?
In the Indianapolis study, 1,171 fatal overdoses were recorded, along with 12,590 non-fatal overdoses, for an average of 1.6 dead each day and another 17.2 experiencing non-fatal overdoses per day.
But reducing the data to “per-day” statistics makes an important mistake: it implies overdoses and deaths are evenly distributed, flat and without rhyme or reason. But the data isn't flattened over time. It contains cracks and crevices, bumps and hills. And those blemishes follow specific beats.
Part of it is how toxic a particular batch of drugs is—unregulated drugs lack consistency, creating serious dangers for drug users.
But as the researchers rather lyrically put it: “Police seizures described as opioids were significantly associated with spatiotemporal clustering of fatal overdoses, nonfatal overdoses, and naloxone administrations at all selected time and distance parameters used in the analysis.”
OK, “lyrically” likely wasn’t the best descriptor for that string of words. Put simply, opioid seizures have a significant correlation both in time and place with fatal and nonfatal overdoses every which way the researchers measured the phenomenon.

The researchers estimated the expected number of overdoses in time and space and compared this expectation with the actual statistics. They found more fatal and nonfatal overdoses than projected within 100 metres and seven days of an opioid seizure; within 250m and 14 days; and within 500m and 21 days. (The 500/21 measure was less significant than the other two.)
The same was seen for stimulant seizures in the 100/7 measure, but fatal overdoses fell within the researchers’ estimated rates when looking at the other space-time pairings.
Enforcement and its link to death
The authors note the study doesn’t form a causal link between law enforcement and toxic drug deaths, nor was it designed to. However, it adds to a growing pile of studies that show an association between the two.
And it complements other research that provides some reasoning for this association.
The most common point you’ll hear is a supply-side analysis—the “iron law” of prohibition, which dictates that enforcement necessarily creates more potent and toxic forms of drugs. Opium became morphine, which became heroin. Heroin turned into black tar and China white heroin and then was replaced with fentanyl. Today, the supply of down is a toxic soup of synthetic opioids, including fentanyl and its analogues, and benzodiazepines.
That’s a market-wide result of enforcement, but individual drug busts, too, are associated with a more chaotic drug market. But the authors of the Indianapolis study also point to how that mixes with issues of demand:
“Persons with opioid use disorder who lose their supply will experience both diminishing tolerance and withdrawal, whereby even the anticipation of painful symptoms may lead them to seek a new supply while discounting risks that stem from the differences in potency inherent in an illicit opioid market; this results in unknown tolerance, uncertainty about a safe dose, and increased overdose risk.”
This is backed up by a 2020 study that notes the protective effects of the relationship between dealers and users. While people often have multiple dealers, the study notes nearly all have a “primary” dealer. And the “large majority” of participants said those primary dealers went “out of their way to alert clients to the presence of fentanyl or even to avoid selling fentanyl-contaminated product completely.”
Having no primary, by contrast, meant little control over what drugs people were using.
And while enforcement of high-level distributors can create power vacuums, leading to gang violence, low-level enforcement—which is far more frequent—can lead to its own form of violence, as The Tyee’s Jen St. Denis wrote in 2020.
So why do we continue this route?
The iron law paper linked above makes a good point on this.
It takes particular issue with pushing medical opioid users into the black market, part of an overreaction to the wrongdoings of Purdue Pharma that ultimately punished the drug users more than anyone else. The paper quotes Marx as saying history repeats itself “first as tragedy and then as farce.” It notes the “continued emphasis on supply-side interventions to suppress non-medical opioid use is both.”
It gets even more scathing, calling the ill health effects of pushing medical opioid users into the black market “not just foreseeable, but in some cases directly foreseen by policy-makers.”
“One of the most shocking articulations of this came from Pennsylvania’s former physician general, who recently remarked, ‘We knew that [drug user transition to the black market] was going to be an issue, that we were going to push addicts in a direction that was going to be more deadly. But … you have to start somewhere,’” it reads.
And that, the authors note, is the point—it’s this belief “that decisive action is more important than reducing overall societal harm.”
That attitude likely informs the tendency to report uncritically on drug busts. But there’s another point that needs to be made about it: the institutional bias the media broadly holds that leads journalists and news outlets to generally put more trust in official sources, such as police, than they would in anyone else.
This is a pervasive bias that I talked about recently on This is Vancolour on CHEK TV. And my former colleague, Tyler Olsen, has a good explanation for at least part of that—it’s not necessarily that the individual journalist is biased (though some certainly are), but that they’re crunched for time and have less access to non-official sources.
Taken individually, each big drug bust seems like a big deal. Cops make hay out of their estimated values, which in the four examples cited at the top of this piece range from $3 million to $13 million and combine for $32 million in drugs, guns and cash—all in one year. (It makes one wonder what media those who claim we’ve all but abandoned enforcement to focus solely on safe supply are consuming; those examples are only from a very cursory Google search.)
Yet, the market continued.