‘Shocking cover-up’: DOJ lawyers committed fraud in vaccine injury case, CHD attorney alleges in motion

From LifeSiteNews

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., The Defender

“The evidence submitted in support of the motion clearly shows that attorneys from the Department of Justice concealed and misrepresented highly relevant information from the special masters in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the judges in the courts”

Rolf Hazlehurst, a Children’s Health Defense (CHD) staff attorney and father of a son with autism, filed a motion in federal court on April 2 alleging lawyers representing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) fraudulently concealed evidence that vaccines can cause autism.

In a motion filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, Hazlehurst alleged that U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers who represented HHS in vaccine injury cases repeatedly defrauded the judicial system – from the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP) to the U.S. Supreme Court.

That fraud led to thousands of families of vaccine-injured children being denied the right to compensation and the right to have their cases heard, according to the motion.

“This motion makes very serious and well-substantiated allegations of a massive scheme of fraud on the courts,” said Kim Mack Rosenberg, CHD general counsel who also is of counsel to Hazlehurst in the federal case.

“The evidence submitted in support of the motion clearly shows that attorneys from the Department of Justice concealed and misrepresented highly relevant information from the special masters in the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program and the judges in the courts,” Mack Rosenberg told The Defender.

Hazlehurst’s son Yates regressed into autism after being vaccinated as an infant. In the early 2000s, his family and thousands of others filed cases seeking compensation for vaccine-induced autism through the NVICP.

Unbeknownst at the time to the petitioners and the NVICP special masters, the DOJ’s star expert medical witness, Dr. Andrew Zimmerman informed DOJ attorneys during the ongoing omnibus proceedings that he had reversed his original opinion and determined that vaccines can and do cause autism in some cases.

In what Hazlehurst alleges was “a shocking cover-up,” instead of allowing Zimmerman to share his revised opinion, the DOJ attorneys relieved Zimmerman of his duties as a witness.

However, they continued to use excerpts from his unamended written opinion to make their case that vaccines did not cause autism – misrepresenting his position and committing “fraud on the court.”

According to the motion, the DOJ’s first act of fraud snowballed into a scheme of deception with far-reaching implications in which DOJ attorneys repeatedly misrepresented Zimmerman’s opinion and concealed other evidence that emerged during the test case hearings in the OAP in subsequent cases before multiple courts.

“As a result, thousands of cases in the Omnibus Autism Proceeding were denied compensation and the impact beyond the OAP is enormous,” Mack Rosenberg said. “This fraud affected the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program – especially the Omnibus Autism Proceeding – the Court of Federal Claims, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and even the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Hazlehurst said he is “asking the court to give this motion the serious attention it deserves.” He added, “At a minimum, the court should allow discovery and hold a hearing on this motion.”

Overturning a ruling due to fraud on the court is an extraordinary remedy reserved for extraordinary cases but according to Hazlehurst, “This motion we filed shows that this indeed is an extraordinary case.”

The DOJ has until April 30 to respond to the motion.

CHD CEO Mary Holland told The Defender, “Vaccines most definitely do cause autism, and the government has been lying about this reality for decades.”

Holland added:

With others, I published a law review article in 2011 showing that the government absolutely knew that vaccines cause autism – and yet they have covered it up and lied about it since the inception of the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

How many hundreds of thousands of children and families would have been spared the heartaches and crushing financial burdens of autism had the government come clean?

‘Exceptionally difficult’ to obtain compensation through NVICP

In the late 1980s, a substantial number of lawsuits for vaccine injuries related to Wyeth’s (now Pfizer) DPT vaccine, combined with “grossly insufficient compensation” for victims of vaccine injury, threatened the vaccine program’s viability.

In response, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, which established the “vaccine court.” The law gave the pharmaceutical industry broad protection from liability and proposed to compensate vaccine-injured children through the new NVICP.

The NVICP originally was designed to be a “swift, flexible, and less adversarial alternative to the often costly and lengthy civil arena of traditional tort litigation.”

To receive compensation, parents file a claim with the program.

The Court of Federal Claims (which oversees the program) appoints “special masters” – typically lawyers who previously represented the U.S. government – to manage and decide the individual claims. Attorneys may represent the petitioners, and the DOJ represents HHS.

NVICP proceedings are more informal than a typical courtroom. Unlike regular court proceedings, petitioners in the “vaccine court” have no right to discovery.

If a petitioner files a claim for a vaccine covered under the program and listed on the Vaccine Injury Table – the list of known vaccine side effects associated with certain vaccines within set time frames – it is presumed that a vaccine caused the petitioner’s injury and the petitioner is eligible for compensation without proof of causation.

However, if a petitioner experiences an “off-table injury” – an injury not listed on the table or that didn’t happen in the recognized injury time frame – the petitioner must prove by “a preponderance of evidence” that the vaccine caused the injury. Evidence includes medical records and expert witness testimony.

Claims must be filed within three years of the first symptom or two years of death.

Petitioners must provide a medical theory of the cause, a sequence of cause and effect, and show a temporal relationship between vaccine and injury.

However, the NVICP does not specify the required volume and type of evidence, so meeting the “preponderance of evidence” standard is largely at the discretion of the special master.

Petitioners can appeal NVICP cases to the Court of Federal Claims, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It is “exceptionally difficult” to obtain compensation within the NVICP, Hazlehurst told The Defender. The proceedings are often turned into drawn-out, contentious expert battles and the backlog of cases is substantial.

The Vaccine Act of 1986 is unjust for petitioners, Hazlehurst alleges. And that injustice reached its zenith with the OAP, when the DOJ perpetrated fraud right under the noses of the special masters, signaling the beginning of the fraud on the courts that continues to this day.

Hazlehurst told The Defender he hopes his motion will shed light on the damage inflicted by this law and that it will ultimately help end the autism epidemic.

“The Vaccine Act of 1986 is one of the fundamental causes of the autism epidemic,” Hazlehurst said. “Understanding why this is true, and how the United States Department of Justice perpetrated fraud upon the courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, is the key to ending the autism epidemic.”

A short history of the autism omnibus proceedings

By 2002, to address a “massive influx” of petitions alleging vaccine-induced autism, the Office of Special Masters combined over 5,000 claims into the OAP to determine whether vaccines cause autism and if so, under what conditions.

Initially, the NVICP planned to investigate causation issues and apply those general findings to individual cases. However, the program changed its strategy and instead selected six “test cases” by which it would examine the evidence for injuries caused by the measles mumps rubella (MMR) vaccine, thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCV), or a combination of both.

Then it would apply the findings of the test cases to other similar cases.

In doing so, Hazlehurst alleges, the court conflated general causation evidence with specific causation evidence from a few cases, without allowing for rules of discovery or evidence that would apply in an actual court.

This, Hazlehurst said, “was a recipe for disaster” as each test case was then used to determine the outcome for the remaining 5,000 cases.

Three cases – Cedillo v. HHS, Hazlehurst v. HHS, and Poling v. HHS – are at the center of the alleged fraud by the DOJ.

Fraud #1: the Zimmerman testimony

Hearings for the first OAP test case, Cedillo v. HHS, began in 2007. Zimmerman had worked with the DOJ to prepare an expert report on behalf of HHS finding that Michelle Cedillo’s autism had likely not been caused by the MMR vaccine.

Zimmerman later wrote in a 2018 affidavit that he attended the Cedillo hearing and listened to the testimony of Dr. Marcel Kinsbourne, another world-renowned expert in pediatric neurology.

On that basis, Zimmerman stated, he decided to clarify his written expert opinion about Michelle Cedillo, concerned it would be taken out of context.

Zimmerman spoke with DOJ attorneys to clarify that his expert opinion in the Cedillo case “was not intended to be a blanket statement as to all children and all medical science,” according to the 2018 affidavit.

He specified that advances in science, medicine and his own clinical research had led him to believe there were exceptions in which vaccinations could cause autism.

He also referred the attorneys to a paper he published with colleagues in 2006, the Poling paper, describing the case of an unidentified child who suffered regressive autism following vaccine adverse reactions. The paper suggested a possible association between mitochondrial dysfunction, vaccinations and regressive autism.

After communicating this evidence to DOJ attorneys, the DOJ dismissed Zimmerman as a witness but continued to use his written opinion as general causation evidence.

The DOJ was also allowed to use that report, submitted in one test case, as general causation evidence in other test cases.

None of the petitioners in the test cases could cross-examine Zimmerman, because he was no longer a witness. This was only possible because the federal rules of evidence do not apply in NVICP proceedings.

Yates’ case, Hazlehurst v. HHS, was the second test case in the OAP. His treating neurologist, Dr. Jean-Ronel Corbier testified Yates’ autism was likely caused by a genetic predisposition combined with an environmental insult in the form of vaccinations administered when Yates was ill. (Yates was a patient of Zimmerman in 2002.)

Corbier’s theory of causation in Yates was similar to the theory developed by Zimmerman in the Poling paper and shared with DOJ attorneys.

Yet, despite knowing Zimmerman had concluded that in a subset of children like Yates, vaccines can cause autism, the DOJ “intentionally and fraudulently” misrepresented Zimmerman’s expert testimony in its closing statements in Yates’ case, Hazlehurst alleges.

DOJ attorneys selectively quoted Zimmerman’s expert report from the Cedillo case, telling the court that Zimmerman found there was “no sound evidence to support a causative relationship with exposure to both or either MMR and/or mercury,” when Zimmerman had explicitly told the DOJ that his opinion was the opposite, according to the affidavit.

Fraud #2: the Hannah Poling case

Three weeks after closing arguments in Yates’ case, the DOJ quietly conceded Hannah Poling’s case, which was on the verge of becoming the fourth test case.

Hannah regressed into autism over several months after being vaccinated against nine diseases at one doctor’s visit.

In 2003, Poling’s father, Jon, a physician and trained neurologist, and mother, Terry, an attorney and nurse, filed an autism petition against HHS under the NVICP for their daughter’s injuries.

Jon Poling was a co-author of the 2006 paper with Zimmerman that analyzed an unnamed child, later revealed as Hannah Poling, who had a mitochondrial disorder – a condition with which Yates was later diagnosed.

In 2007, just three weeks after the lead DOJ attorney misrepresented Zimmerman’s opinion during the hearing in Hazlehurst, the same DOJ attorney submitted a report to the special masters conceding that in the case of Poling v. HHS, Hannah’s “regressive encephalopathy with features of autism spectrum disorder” (i.e., regressive autism) was caused by a vaccine injury, based upon a preponderance of the evidence standard.

This was the same neurological diagnosis Zimmerman had made for Yates in 2002.

According to court documents, if HHS had not conceded Poling, Poling v. HHS would have been designated as a test case. However, because the DOJ conceded the case, it was taken out of the omnibus and the DOJ had the case records sealed – although they were later leaked to the press and published in the Huffington Post in 2008.

In March 2008, Hannah’s parents moved to make the proceedings transparent and available to the public, but the DOJ opposed the motion and the NVICP deferred a ruling on the motion for 60 days.

During those 60 days, the DOJ filed amendments to its report conceding the Poling case. It retroactively changed the basis for compensation to say that Hannah had a “table injury.”

This meant that instead of conceding that the petitioners had proven with a preponderance of evidence that the vaccines caused her autism, they said she had a presumptive injury on the vaccine table, in which causation is presumed.

By conceding the Poling case, opposing the parents’ motion for complete transparency and changing the basis for compensation, the DOJ was able to conceal fraud and critical material evidence of how vaccines cause autism, according to Hazlehurst.

Fraud #3: appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court

On Feb. 12, 2009, the special masters denied compensation in the first three cases. They found the petitioners failed to establish causation between MMR or TCV vaccines and autism.

In Hazlehurst’s case, the NVICP explicitly relied on the portion of Zimmerman’s expert report that DOJ attorneys misrepresented.

The Hazlehursts appealed to the Court of Federal Claims and the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, both of which upheld the special master’s decision – by relying on Zimmerman’s misrepresented opinion and knowingly fraudulent statements made by a DOJ attorney, according to Hazlehurst.

Those prior decisions directly influenced the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in the Bruesewitz v. Wyeth.

In that case, Wyeth, now Pfizer, argued that a decision favoring the Bruesewitz family – who was attempting to sue the company for their daughter’s vaccine injury – would lead to a “flood of frivolous lawsuits,” including by the families from the omnibus.

Amicus briefs from the American Academy of Pediatrics, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and Sanofi Pasteur on behalf of Wyeth relied on Hazlehurst v. HHS and other OAP decisions that were based on the misrepresentation of Zimmerman’s testimony that there was “no scientific basis” that vaccines cause autism.

The Supreme Court ruled that the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, and the NVICP it created, preempt all design-defect claims against vaccine manufacturers by individuals seeking compensation for injury or death.

In oral arguments and in their written opinions, the justices explicitly cited the portions of the amicus briefs citing Hazlehurst v. HHS and other OAP rulings that relied on the DOJ misrepresentations in their rulings.

Since that ruling, the special masters have continued to rely on the DOJ’s fraudulent claims to deny compensation to families filing complaints in the NVICP.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., CHD chairman on leave, and Hazlehurst in September 2018 filed a complaint with the DOJ Office of Inspector General outlining what they then knew about the DOJ’s fraud during the OAP.

The DOJ Office of Professional Misconduct investigated and responded in a June 2019 letter that it found no wrongdoing.

In that letter, however, the Office of Professional Responsibility conceded the DOJ had in fact kept Zimmerman’s testimony while dismissing him as a witness in order to avoid creating the appearance that he had changed his opinion and to prevent the petitioners from cross-examining him, according to Hazlehurst.

The ‘fraud on the court’ doctrine

It has taken 17 years, Hazlehurst said, since the DOJ’s first alleged act of fraud upon the court, for him to gather all of the admissible evidence necessary to “connect the dots and reveal the DOJ’s web of deceit” to make this claim under the “fraud on the court” doctrine.

Under this doctrine, codified as Rule 60(d)(3) in the rules of the Court of Federal Claims, there is no time limit for the court to overturn a judgment made on the basis of fraud on the court.

The petitioner must demonstrate that there was fraud, intent to defraud and that the fraud affected more than one instance of litigation – putting the integrity of the judicial process at stake.

Hazlehurst alleges DOJ attorneys committed fraud by knowingly making false statements and offering evidence they knew to be false and that they did not take remedial action to disclose information they knew to be false and misleading to the court.

The special masters themselves have an obligation to consider all relevant evidence, but didn’t, in this case, Hazlehurst said. Instead, they ignored the contradictions in Zimmerman’s opinions and ignored the Poling evidence.

This is particularly problematic for NVICP cases, where petitioners can’t conduct meaningful discovery or cross-examination and the special masters’ oversight is the only meaningful safeguard to prevent the DOJ’s abuse of power, according to Hazlehurst.

“There is nothing fair about a government proceeding where the government controls the admissibility of evidence,” he said.

Hazlehurst said that by forcing people injured by vaccines into an administrative program, petitioners are deprived of the basic constitutional rights to due process and equal protection under the law. “It should be declared unconstitutional,” he said.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

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B.C. doubles down on involuntary care despite underinvestment

Published on May 31, 2025

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By Alexandra Keeler

B.C.’s push to replace coercive care with community models never took hold — and experts say province isn’t fixing that problem

Two decades ago, B.C. closed one of the last large mental institutions in the province. The institution, known as Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam, had at its peak housed nearly 5,000 patients across a sprawling campus.

There, patients with mental illnesses were subjected to a range of inhumane treatments, city records show. These included coma therapy, induced seizures, lobotomies and electroshock therapy.

When the province transferred patients out of institutions like Riverview during the 1990s and early 2000s, it promised them access to community-based mental health care instead. But that system never materialized.

“There was not a sustained commitment to seeing [the deinstitutionalization process] through,” said Julian Somers, a professor at Simon Fraser University who specializes in mental health, addiction and homelessness.

“[B.C.] did not put forward a clear vision of what we were trying to achieve and how we were going to get there. So we languished.”

Today, amid a sharp rise in involuntary hospitalizations, experts say B.C. risks repeating the mistakes of the past. The province is using coercive forms of care to treat individuals with mental health and substance use disorders, while failing to build community supports.

“We’re essentially doing the same thing we did with institutions,” said Somers, who began his clinical career at Riverview Hospital in the 1980s.

“[We’re] creating a system that doesn’t actually help people and may make things worse.”

ECT machines and electrodes from the Riverview Hospital Artifact Collection. | City of Coquitlam

Riverview’s legacy

B.C.’s push for deinstitutionalization was driven by growing evidence that large psychiatric institutions were harmful, and that community-based care was more humane and cost effective.

Nationally, advances in antipsychotic medication, rising civil rights concerns and growing financial pressures were also spurring a shift away from institutional care.

A 2006 Senate report showed community care could match institutional care in both effectiveness and cost — provided it was properly funded.

“There was sufficient evidence demonstrating that people with severe mental illness had better outcomes in community settings,” said Somers.

Somers says people who stay long term in institutions can develop “institutionalization syndrome,” characterized by increased dependency, worse mental health outcomes and greater social decline.

At the time, B.C. was restructuring its health system, promising to replace institutions like Riverview with a regional network of mental health services.

The problem was, that network never fully materialized.

Marina Morrow, a professor at York University’s School of Health Policy and Management who tracked B.C.’s deinstitutionalization process, says the province placed patients in alternative care. But these providers were not always well-equipped to manage psychiatric patients.

“Nobody left Riverview directly to the street,” Morrow said. “But some … might have ended up being homeless over time.”

A 2012 study led by Morrow found that older psychiatric Riverview patients who were relocated to remote regional facilities strained overburdened and ill-equipped staff, leading to poor patient outcomes.

Somers says B.C. abandoned its vision of a robust, community-based system.

“We allowed BC Housing to have responsibility for mental health and addiction housing,” he said. “And no one explained to BC Housing how they ought to best fulfill that responsibility.”

Somers says the province’s reliance on group housing was part of the problem. Group housing isolates residents from broader society, instead of integrating them into a community. A 2013 study by Somers shows people tend to have better outcomes if they get to live in “scattered-site housing,” where tenants live in diverse neighbourhoods while still receiving personalized support.

“All of us … are influenced substantially by where we live, what we do, and who we do things with,” he said.

Somers says a greater investment in community care would have emphasized better housing, nutrition, education, work and social connection. “Those are all way more important than medical care in terms of the health of the population,” he said.

“We closed institutions having no [alternative] functioning model.”

Reinstitutionalization

Despite B.C.’s efforts to deinstitutionalize, the practice of institutionalizing certain patients never truly went away.

“We institutionalize way more people now than we ever did, even at peak Riverview population,” said Laura Johnston, legal director at Health Justice, a B.C. non-profit focused on coercive health laws.

Between 2008 and 2018, involuntary hospitalizations rose nearly 66 per cent, while voluntary admissions remained flat.

In the 2023-24 fiscal year, more than 25,000 individuals were involuntarily hospitalized at acute care facilities, down only slightly from 26,600 the previous year, according to B.C.’s health ministry. These admissions involved about 18,000 unique patients, indicating many individuals were detained more than once.

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In September 2024, a string of high-profile attacks in Vancouver by individuals with histories of mental illness reignited public calls to reopen Riverview Hospital.

That month, B.C. Premier David Eby pledged to further expand involuntary care. Currently, B.C. has 75 designated facilities that can hold individuals admitted under the Mental Health Act. The act permits individuals to be involuntarily detained if they have a mental disorder requiring treatment and are significantly impaired. These existing facilities host about 2,000 beds for involuntary patients.

Eby’s pledge was to add another 400 hospital-based mental health beds, and two new secure care facilities within correctional facilities.

Johnston, of Health Justice, says Eby’s announcement merely continues the same flawed approach. It “[ties] access to services with detention and an involuntary care approach, rather than investing in the voluntary, community-based services that we’re so sorely lacking in B.C.”

Kathryn Embacher, provincial executive director of adult mental health and substance use with BC Mental Health & Substance Use Services, says additional resources are needed to support those with complex needs.

“We continue to work with the provincial government to increase the services we are providing,” Embacher said. “Having enough resources to serve the most seriously ill clients is important to provide access to all clients.”

θəqiʔ ɫəwʔənəq leləm’ (the Red Fish Healing Centre for Mental Health and Addiction) is for clients with complex and concurrent mental health and substance use disorders. | BC Mental Health and Substance Use Services website

Inertia

If B.C. wants to avoid repeating the mistakes of its past, it needs to change its approach, sources say.

One concern Johnston has is with Section 32 of the Mental Health Act. Largely unchanged since 1964, it grants broad powers to medical professionals to detain and control patients.

“It grants unchecked authority,” she said.

Data obtained by Health Justice show one in four involuntarily detained patients in B.C. is subjected to seclusion or restraint. And even this figure may understate the problem. B.C. only began reliably tracking its seclusion and restraint practices in 2020, and only collects data on the first three days of detention.

A B.C. health ministry spokesperson told Canadian Affairs that involuntary care is sometimes necessary when individuals in crisis pose a risk to themselves or others.

“It’s in these situations where a patient, who meets very specific criteria, may need to be held involuntarily under the Mental Health Act,” the spokesperson said.

But York University professor Morrow says those “specific criteria” are applied far too broadly. “We have this huge hammer [involuntary care] that sees everything as a nail,” she said. “Involuntary treatment was meant for rare, extreme cases. But that’s not how it’s being used today.”

Morrow advocates for reviving interdisciplinary care that brings psychiatry, psychology and primary care together in community-based settings. She pointed to several promising models, including Toronto’s Gerstein Crisis Centre, which provides community-based crisis services for those with mental health and substance use issues.

Somers sees Alberta’s recovery-oriented model as a potential blueprint. This model prioritizes live-in recovery communities that combine therapeutic support with job training and stable housing, and which permit residents to stay up to one year. Alberta has committed to building 11 such communities across the province.

“They provide people with respite,” Somers said.

“They provide them with the opportunity to practice and gain confidence, waking up each day, going through each day without drugs, seeing other people do it, gaining confidence that they themselves can do it.”

Johnston advocates for safeguards on involuntary treatment.

“There’s nothing in our laws that compels the health system to ensure that they’re offering community-based or voluntary based services wherever possible, and that they are not using involuntary care approaches without exhausting other options,” she said.

“There’s inertia in a system that’s operated this way for so long.”

This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.

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Addictions

Man jailed for trafficking diverted safer supply drugs, sparking fresh debate over B.C. drug policies

Published on May 31, 2025

Todayville

By Alexandra Keeler

Nanaimo drug trafficker’s case is further evidence of safer supply diversion. But some sources say even diverted drugs reduce harm

In early May, 68-year-old Ronald Schilling of Nanaimo, B.C., was sentenced to three years in prison for trafficking street drugs such as fentanyl and meth — as well as government-supplied opioids.

When authorities had arrested Schilling two years earlier, they had found him in possession of more than 80 government-supplied opioid pill bottles labeled with other patients’ names.

Those pills had been dispensed to patients under B.C.’s “prescribed alternatives” program, more commonly known as safer supply. The program aims to reduce overdose deaths by dispensing pharmaceutical opioids to drug users as an alternative to toxic street drugs.

In Schilling, patients of this program had found a drug dealer who was willing to give them harder drugs — such as fentanyl — in exchange for their prescription opioids. Schilling would in turn sell their prescription opioids to others.

“Mr. Schilling preyed upon people who were taking the safe supply drug,” Provincial Court Judge Karen Whonnock said during the sentencing hearing.

Schilling’s case is further evidence that safer supply opioids are making their way to the streets — and having unintended negative consequences. However, some sources say even diverted pills reduce harm if they flood the market with safer drugs.

‘Upside Down’

Schilling, a former charity worker, developed a cocaine addiction after the sudden death of his partner. He ultimately turned to drug trafficking to fund his addiction, according to his lawyer.

In court, the prosecution described Schilling as operating a mid-level drug trafficking scheme that exploited B.C.’s safer supply program.

Schilling coordinated with multiple dealers to source both illicit and prescription drugs, and had at least three individuals working under him. His text messages showed he would arrange to meet clients near Nanaimo’s Outreach Pharmacy to trade potent street drugs for the prescribed medications they had just received.

He operated under the name “Upside Down Inc.” — “down” being a street reference to fentanyl — and had business cards to match. To reassure users that the street drugs were safe, he would have them tested at a local overdose prevention site.

‘Predatory behaviour’

While Schilling’s case is unusual, it adds to the growing body of evidence that provincial safer supply programs are not always being used as intended.

In one example, a B.C. government report released in February revealed that more than 60 pharmacies were involved in a kick-back scheme, offering patients cash or rewards to fill safer supply prescriptions they did not need. Some of those drugs were then sold on the black market.

Collen Middleton, a co-founder of the Nanaimo Area Public Safety Association, refers to safer supply drugs as the “perfect consumer product.”

“They are a product that produces its own demand, because it’s addictive,” said Middleton, whose neighbourhood association is a vocal critic of safer supply.

One of Middleton’s concerns is that safer supply drugs are presented as safe, despite being addictive themselves. He says this makes them an effective gateway to more dangerous street drugs like fentanyl.

“Those drugs are being marketed as safe to kids … [so] you’re bringing more people into using addictive drugs, more abuse, more predatory behaviour toward a vulnerable segment of the population,” he said.

The B.C. Ministry of Health told Canadian Affairs in an emailed statement that it takes the “diversion of prescription medications … very seriously.”

“The unauthorized distribution is illegal and puts the public at risk,” it said.

In response to the B.C. pharmacy scandal, the province tightened its protocols for dispensing prescription opioids. All new and most existing patients must take prescription opioids under the supervision of health-care professionals, a protocol known as witnessed dosing. In rare cases, existing clients may continue to take their doses offsite if the prescriber views the risk of diversion as low.

Mixed evidence

In its statement to Canadian Affairs, B.C.’s health ministry also said its safer supply program “plays an important role in reducing substance use-related harms” and can lower overdose risk by as much as 91 per cent.

This figure comes from a 2024 B.C. study published in the British Medical Journal. That study found individuals prescribed pharmaceutical opioids early in the pandemic were 91 per cent less likely to die from any cause in the week after receiving at least four days of safer supply opioids, compared to a control group.

The study only tracked outcomes during the week following prescription fills. It did not verify whether individuals took the opioids as prescribed.

A study published in April in The Lancet Public Health shows B.C.’s safer supply programs are linked to improved short-term health outcomes, including fewer overdoses and hospital visits.

However, a population-level study in JAMA Health Forum found no significant reduction in overdoses or mortality associated with B.C.’s safer supply and decriminalization policies. It also suggested possible increases in emergency department visits and hospitalizations.

Comprehensive long-term research on the health impacts of Canadian safer supply programs is limited.

Creating a market

Some sources say the diversion of prescription opioids may be less harmful than the alternatives.

“If you could replace [street] drugs with safer pharmaceutical alternatives, people’s needs would be met,” said Perry Kendall, B.C.’s former provincial health officer and a long-time harm reduction advocate.

“They wouldn’t have to turn to the illicit market, and their risk of a toxic drug overdose would be significantly reduced.”

In Kendall’s view, Schilling was in some ways functioning as a harm-reduction worker.

“[Schilling] was kind of offering a harm reduction service, as well as supplying people with the drugs they wanted,” Kendall said.

Kendall’s views are echoed in a 2023 B.C. government review that notes diversion of safer supply drugs to people already at risk of drug poisoning may be beneficial. But the review also acknowledges that diversion to users who would not otherwise use unregulated drugs is harmful.

Still, Kendall acknowledged a fundamental issue: “[Safer supply opioids don’t] really give you the same high [as fentanyl]. So if you can trade [them] to … get what you’re looking for, which is fentanyl, then that’s what you will do.”

Leonard Krog, the mayor of Nanaimo, says it is clear that, within Nanaimo, B.C.’s policies to help drug users are making it easier for dealers to sell their toxic drugs.

“We have a safe injection site next to City Hall, and there’s no question dealers are coming down here and they’re selling their stuff, because the market’s right here,” said Krog.

But Kendall warns that pulling back on decriminalization and safer supply programs creates a dangerous gap.

“The daftest thing you can do is create a market of desperate people and then fail to fill it,” said Kendall. “Somebody’s going to meet those needs — and they’re not going to be law-abiding citizens.”

Krog is unconvinced.

“If we make it easier for the wolves to successfully exploit the sheep, is that a good thing?”