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Opinion

Fentanyl Fiasco: The Tragic Missteps of BC’s Drug Policy

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10 minute read

From The Opposition News Network

Unmasking the Destructive Cycle of Drug Policy in British Columbia. A Tale of Good Intentions and Dire Consequences

My fellow Canadians, it’s been a challenging time. I had initially planned to bring you the latest spectacle from the House of Commons, featuring Kristian Firth, but fate had other plans. A personal emergency struck closer to home—a fentanyl overdose in the family. This tragic event threw us headlong into the chaotic circus that is the British Columbia health system. Let me be frank: the system is a mockery. The privacy laws that supposedly protect us also shroud our crises in unnecessary mystery. When my uncle was found unconscious and rushed to the ICU, the walls of confidentiality meant we could not even ascertain his condition over the phone. They notify you of the disaster but cloak its nature in secrecy. It’s an absurdity that only adds to the anguish of families grappling with the realities of addiction.

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room: our approach to drug addiction. The authorities label it a disease, yet paradoxically offer the afflicted the choice between seeking help and remaining in their dire state. This half-hearted stance on drug addiction only perpetuates a cycle of relapse and despair. As we speak, thousands tumble through the revolving doors of our medical facilities—5,975 apparent opioid toxicity deaths this year alone, an 8% increase from 2022. Daily, we see 22 deaths and 17 hospitalizations, and yet our response remains as ineffective as ever. This issue transcends our national borders. The U.S. has openly criticized China for its role in the opioid crisis, accusing it of flooding North America with fentanyl—a drug so potent, it’s decimating communities at an unprecedented rate. Just last year, over 70,000 Americans succumbed to fentanyl overdoses. And what’s more damning? Reports from U.S. congressional committees suggest that the Chinese government might be subsidizing firms that traffic these lethal substances. Lets be clear this is a state-sponsored assault on our populace.

In response to this crisis BC NDP policymakers have championed the notion of “safe supply” programs. These initiatives distribute free hydromorphone, a potent opioid akin to heroin, with the intention of steering users away from the perils of contaminated street drugs. At first glance, this approach might seem logical, even humane. However, the grim realities paint a far different picture, one where good intentions pave the road to societal decay. Addiction specialists are sounding the alarm, and the news isn’t good. While hydromorphone is potent, it lacks the intensity to satisfy fentanyl users, leading to an unintended consequence: diversion. Users, unappeased by the drug’s effects, are selling their “safe” supply on the black market. This results in a glut of hydromorphone flooding the streets, crashing its price by up to 95% in certain areas. This collapse in street value might seem like a win for economic textbooks, but in the harsh world of drug abuse, it’s a catalyst for disaster. Cheap, readily available opioids are finding their way into the hands of an ever-younger audience, ensnaring teenagers in the grips of addiction. Far from reducing harm, these programs are inadvertently setting the stage for a new wave of drug dependency among our most vulnerable.

Programs designed to save lives are instead spinning a web of addiction that ensnares not just existing drug users but also initiates unsuspecting adolescents into a life of dependency. What’s needed isn’t more drugs, even under the guise of medical oversight, but a robust support system that addresses the root causes of addiction yet, the stark reality on the streets tells a story of systemic failure. Let’s dissect the current approach to handling addiction, a condition deeply intertwined with our societal, legal, and health systems.

Take a typical scenario—an individual battling the throes of addiction. Many of them find themselves ensnared by the law, often for crimes like theft, driven by the desperate need to sustain their habit. Yes, many addicts find themselves behind bars, where, paradoxically, they claim to clean up. Jail, devoid of freedom, ironically becomes a place of forced sobriety.

Now, consider the next step in this cycle: release. Upon their release, these individuals, now momentarily clean, are promised treatment—real help, real change. Yet, here’s the catch: this promised help is dangled like a carrot on a stick, often 30 or more days away. What happens in those 30 days? Left to their own devices, many relapse, falling back into old patterns before they ever step foot in a treatment facility.

This brings us to a critical question: why release an individual who has begun to detox in a controlled environment, only to thrust them back into the very conditions that fueled their addiction? Why not maintain custody until a treatment spot opens up? From a fiscal perspective, this dance of incarceration, release, and delayed treatment is an exercise in futility, burning through public funds without solving the core issue. Moreover, from a standpoint of basic human decency and dignity, this system is profoundly flawed. We play roulette with lives on the line, hoping against odds for a favorable outcome when we already hold a losing hand. This isn’t just ineffective; it’s cruel.

Final Thoughts

As we close the curtain on this discussion, let’s not mince words. The BC system’s approach to drug addiction treatment isn’t just flawed; it’s a catastrophic failure masquerading as mercy. Opposition leader Pierre Poilievre has hit the nail squarely on the head in his piece for the National Post. He articulates a vision where compassion and practicality intersect, not through the failed policies of perpetual maintenance, but through genuine, recovery-oriented solutions. His stance is clear: treat addiction as the profound health crisis it is, not as a criminal issue to be swept under the rug of incarceration.

Contrast this with the so-called ‘safe supply’ madness—a Band-Aid solution to a hemorrhaging societal wound. In the dystopian theatre of the Downtown Eastside, where welfare checks and drug dens operate with the efficiency of a grotesque assembly line, what we see is not healthcare, but a deathcare system. It’s a cycle of despair that offers a needle in one hand and a shot of naloxone in the other as a safety net. This isn’t treatment; it’s a perverse form of life support that keeps the heart beating but lets the soul wither.

Come next election in BC, if any provincial party is prepared to advocate for a true treatment-first approach, to shift from enabling addiction to empowering recovery, they will have my—and should have your—unwavering support. We must champion platforms that prioritize recovery, that respect human dignity, and that restore hope to the heartbroken streets of our communities.

The NDP BC government’s current model perpetuates death and decay under the guise of progressive policy. It’s a cruel joke on the citizens who need help the most. We can no longer afford to stand idly by as lives are lost to a system that confuses sustaining addiction with saving lives. Let’s rally for change, for recovery, for a future where Canadians struggling with addiction are given a real shot at redemption. This isn’t just a political imperative—it’s a moral one. The time for half-measures is over. The time for real action is now.

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Will Mexico Face A Hot Shooting War With The Cartels?

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From Todd Bensman for the Daily Wire

As Mexico prepares to position 10,000 troops between cartels and their drug money, odds are the lead will fly

The chosen political slogan of Mexico’s last and current president, “Abrazos, no balazos” (“Hugs, not Bullets”), is often embraced to describe official government policy toward the country’s ultra-violent drug-trafficking cartels. The beauty of this slogan is that it requires no explanation.

The reverse, however, “Bullets, not Hugs,” is probably up next whether Mexico likes it or not. President Donald Trump has just forced Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to capitulate to a threat of ruinous 25% trade tariffs on Mexican exports unless she uses military force to suppress the flow of fentanyl (and illegal immigrant smuggling) over the U.S. southern border. She’s deploying 10,000 troops to cartel country, right smack in the drug-trafficking lanes of Mexico’s far northern precincts along the U.S. border.

This deployment of Mexican troops, however, is quite different from previous ones, in which the main mission was to slow illegal immigration only, including during Trump’s first term and throughout the Biden term. For this one, the Trump mission demand is, as State Department Spokeswoman Tammy Bruce put it recently, that Mexico needs to “…dismantle transnational criminal organizations, halt illegal migration, and stem the flow of fentanyl and precursor chemicals from China.”

That American priority has just put Mexican forces in the crosshairs of the most sensitive cartel hotspot: the blood-soaked zone between heavily armed cartel forces and their money just across the U.S. border.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO - FEBRUARY 06: Mexican National Guard patrol along the U.S.-Mexico border on February 06, 2025 near Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Advance units of troops deployed to the border under orders of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened tariffs on Mexican goods. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
John Moore/Getty Images

As if this was not provocative enough on its own, a senior Trump official with direct knowledge told me bilateral plans call for at least some of the more trusted of Mexico’s forces to physically attack cartel-run narcotics depots that would include pre-smuggling fentanyl hubs inside Mexico.

Certain U.S. intelligence groups are working with the Mexican government “to give them an exact laydown. They say they’re going to target the narcotics. We’re literally still at the table.”

All of this should prove triggering, literally, to any of Mexico’s nine main cartels once the whole enterprise ramps up in earnest.

I have a good feel for what this set of circumstances portends. As a reporter for Hearst News in San Antonio, Texas, from 2006-2009, I regularly covered the exceptionally bloody civil drug war against the cartels that Felipe de Jesus Calderón Hinojosa (2006-2012) declared and which, after hundreds of thousands of Mexican casualties, spawned the popularly preferred “Hugs, not Bullets” policies of his successors. The U.S. partnered with Mexico throughout the war, providing targeting intelligence and billions of dollars to modernize its security forces. All of that was for a quest to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.

But after six years of ferocious combat and widespread torture and assassination, Mexico retreated in almost total defeat. The drug flow may have dipped from time to time but it never stopped.

In the years since, I’ve often pondered whether Calderón and his successors should have trebled down when defeat seemed inevitable, as did former President George W. Bush during the Iraq war. When the chips were down amid calls for a humiliating U.S. withdrawal during the Iraq war, Bush famously turned the tables by deploying 30,000 more troops. With Mexico, however, disrupting fentanyl production and trafficking with the military will not be easy, and may very well spark another government-cartel war similar to 2006-2012.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO - FEBRUARY 06: Mexican troops patrol the U.S.-Mexico border on February 06, 2025 near Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Advance units of soldiers deployed to the border under orders of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened tariffs on Mexican goods. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
John Moore/Getty Images

The stars and planets all seem to be aligning for more violence, including from an unexpected quarter: President Sheinbaum herself may be aching for this fight.

Rodrigo Nieto-Gomez, a Mexico-born and educated national security research professor for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California said Sheinbaum has installed anti-cartel Morena Party hardliners over much of Mexico’s state security apparatuses. This wing of her party, Nieto-Gomez explained, has been spoiling to shed the “Hugs, not bullets” policy for a good hard fight with the cartels.

Trump is now providing a “top-cover” excuse for them to finally exert the military pressure they’ve been wanting.

“Trump’s actions have temporarily tilted the playing field in favor of Morena,” Nieto-Gomez said. “With the right philosophy and the right level of American support, we may see a different type of violence in Mexico.”

Perhaps a worthy achievable goal for Mexican military fireworks is that it forces a sort of devil’s truce where the cartels, whose leaders are the most consummate and pragmatic of capitalists, ultimately agree to voluntarily quit fentanyl altogether as a good business decision — if the other drugs are allowed to roll in as usual. After all, when the operatives are shooting and dying, they’re spending rather than earning.

What seems certain, however, is that Trump’s inevitable following through on his campaign promises to suppress fentanyl ups the chances of a conflict between the Mexican military and the cartels. No doubt the cartels are now feeling uncharacteristically pinched these days on many other fronts thanks to Trump’s return.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO - FEBRUARY 06: Mexican National Guard patrol the U.S.-Mexico border on February 06, 2025 near Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Advance units of troops deployed to the border under orders of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened tariffs on Mexican goods. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
John Moore/Getty Images

Trump has asked his Secretary of State to designate them as foreign terrorist organizations, which would open authorities for America and its allies to seize assets and prosecute banks and people who work with the cartels on serious “material support” crimes. To isolate and weaken them where it counts, in the pocketbook, and disrupt their global operations.

And, of course, Trump has all but killed the biggest cash cow those cartels have seen in years by shuttering the southern border almost hermetically in a matter of days. Their smugglers are moving probably fewer than 500 illegal immigrants a day now, most of them caught and deported right away, compared to 14,000 a day last December. Those numbers are a catastrophe and should drive the cartels to invest everything they have in drug trafficking again.

Because they are now free from babysitting and processing illegal migrants all day long, Border Patrol is back on the drug traffickers full force and they have help, the U.S. military is down there glassing the landscape and using surveillance assets to spot the traffickers.

Some of the cartels were already so frustrated their leaders approved the use of drones to attack U.S. agents standing in the way of drug loads. Cases of firearms attacks on Border Patrol are rising.

Now Mexico’s going to put 10,000 troops in between them and their money?

If she is not already, Sheinbaum should be preparing for the worst right about now. President Trump absolutely expects some kind of real action — with demonstrable results — or else he’ll push that tariff button. She’s under pressure right now to produce something, anything, whether for show or not. And the cartels are ever ready to go to war.

Thanks to former President Joe Biden’s mass migration program, it could very well happen, because now the impulsive, brazen, money-hungry cartels are are extremely well-armed from the billions they all earned over the past four years.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, MEXICO - FEBRUARY 06: Mexican National Guard troops patrol the bank of the Rio Grande at the U.S.-Mexico border on February 06, 2025 near Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Advance units of troops deployed to the border under orders of Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum after U.S. President Donald Trump threatened tariffs on Mexican goods. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
John Moore/Getty Images

Sheinbaum undoubtedly discerns the dangers here and will have to tread carefully between appeasing Trump and sparking another all-out civil war, which many in the United States believe is long overdue. And maybe it is. She and all the cartel leaders would probably feel lucky to cap things down to merely a “splendid little war” like the 1898 Spanish-American war.

But President Trump knows the art of the deal often pivots on what’s good business for everyone involved.

Mexico’s 2006-2012 war shows the cartels will more than likely survive whatever fireworks are coming, if any. Trump may make them realize sooner rather than later that they just have to give up the fentanyl.

* * *

Todd Bensman is a Senior National Security Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies and a two-time National Press Club award winner. He is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism and a 23-year veteran newspaper reporter. He is the author of “America’s Covert Border War,” and “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.”

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Daily Caller

‘Joe, You’re Fired’: Trump Revokes Biden’s Security Clearance

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From the Daily Caller News Foundation

By Mariane Angela

President Donald Trump took to social media Friday to announce that he is terminating the security clearances of former President Joe Biden and discontinuing his daily intelligence briefings.

In a Truth Social Post, Trump said Biden no longer needs access to classified information. Trump cited a precedent set by Biden in 2021, when Biden directed the Intelligence Community (IC) to cease providing national security details to the 45th President, a courtesy historically extended to former presidents.

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“There is no need for Joe Biden to continue receiving access to classified information. Therefore, we are immediately revoking Joe Biden’s Security Clearances, and stopping his daily Intelligence Briefings,” Trump wrote. “He set this precedent in 2021, when he instructed the Intelligence Community (IC) to stop the 45th President of the United States (ME!) from accessing details on National Security, a courtesy provided to former Presidents.”

In the post, Trump referenced the Hur Report, saying it showed Biden has a “poor memory” and was unreliable with sensitive information even at his best.

“The Hur Report revealed that Biden suffers from “poor memory” and, even in his “prime,” could not be trusted with sensitive information. I will always protect our National Security — JOE, YOU’RE FIRED. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!,” Trump wrote.

Per a senior administration official: “The process to forbid Biden from getting classified information is underway.”

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