Full Comment - July 21, 2025


How Canadian fentanyl smuggling to the U.S. really works and who’s behind it


Episode Stats


Length

44 minutes

Words per minute

151.76321

Word count

6,804

Sentence count

409

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Jonathan Calkins is a professor of Operations Research and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and a co-author of a recent paper called Fentanyl at the Gates, comparing large seizures at the U.S. and Canadian borders.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:01:16.720 If you were to listen to Donald Trump, the American president,
00:01:36.340 you would think that Canada was a hotbed for fentanyl,
00:01:39.040 that we were flooding the American markets.
00:01:41.820 Well, if you listen to too many Canadians, we have no role at all. 1.00
00:01:45.400 Where is the truth? Somewhere in between.
00:01:47.620 Hi, I'm Brian Lilly. Welcome to the Full Comment Podcast.
00:01:50.420 Today, we're going to be speaking to a professor who has looked at this issue.
00:01:54.840 Jonathan Calkins is the Stever University Professor of Operations Research
00:01:59.660 and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College.
00:02:03.440 He recently had a paper out with the Manhattan Institute called Fentanyl at the Gates,
00:02:08.920 comparing large seizures at the U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian borders.
00:02:13.660 While we aren't major players in seizures of fentanyl going across the border,
00:02:17.900 if you listen to Dr. Calkins, we aren't innocent either.
00:02:21.380 Here's our conversation.
00:02:22.900 So, Professor Calkins, the argument about the northern border,
00:02:27.560 or I guess our southern border, and fentanyl has been,
00:02:30.920 from the Trump administration, Canada's a real problem.
00:02:34.280 From the former Trudeau government, there's no problem at all.
00:02:37.500 From the current Carney government, there is an issue and we'll deal with it.
00:02:42.340 My view has always been that we may not be the source of most of the fentanyl,
00:02:47.780 but we're not nothing, and there is an organized crime element in here
00:02:51.860 that Canada does need to take some responsibility for.
00:02:56.100 You've looked at the seizures, you've looked at the supply chains,
00:03:00.360 that's your specialty, organized crime supply chains.
00:03:02.760 I love that.
00:03:03.840 What are you finding?
00:03:05.880 I agree with the current perspective.
00:03:08.100 That is, it's not nothing, but it's a very small proportion of the amount coming into the United States,
00:03:13.760 so Trump doesn't have a basis for claims about floods coming in.
00:03:18.880 But there are drugs moving, and it behooves both countries to cooperate
00:03:24.740 and try to disrupt what is happening.
00:03:28.020 Because the basic story is Canada and the United States suffer from this internationally sourced fentanyl,
00:03:37.040 and that is moved by international criminal organizations.
00:03:41.880 They are difficult to deal with, they're important to deal with,
00:03:46.040 and the countries should be working together to try to address that threat.
00:03:50.920 But when you looked at counties, and you went county by county,
00:03:55.460 and you're not talking city or state, you're talking county,
00:03:58.200 it's a very standardized political jurisdiction across the United States,
00:04:04.200 were there any counties touching the Canadian border where fentanyl coming across was a major issue?
00:04:10.380 Yeah, so you're right, the unit of analysis was counties.
00:04:14.040 There are 3,000 of them in the United States, so it's a relatively fine-grained unit of analysis.
00:04:18.940 The reason we use that is that's just the degree to which the data had been anonymized by law enforcement
00:04:24.880 before they were released to us.
00:04:26.660 Yeah, there were just basically three that stood out relative to their population.
00:04:33.060 That last caveat is there's a county called Wayne County that includes Detroit.
00:04:37.420 It is on the border with Canada.
00:04:40.020 You find a fair amount of fentanyl there, but that's because Detroit is a big city with a lot of people using.
00:04:45.640 There's no reason to suspect that the fentanyl located there came from Canada.
00:04:50.620 It probably reached Detroit from Mexico the same way any other large city in the interior of the United States
00:04:58.200 has fentanyl seized in it also.
00:05:01.040 So the three little counties that stood out, one was sort of a red herring, Okanagan County
00:05:07.240 on the northern border of Washington state across from British Columbia, had...
00:05:14.820 And that's immediately below Vancouver, correct?
00:05:18.540 That was Whatcom County.
00:05:20.780 Okay.
00:05:21.700 It's easy to confuse these names.
00:05:24.400 I shouldn't give anyone a geography quiz.
00:05:26.440 So we'll do Whatcom first.
00:05:27.500 So Whatcom is just south of Vancouver on Interstate Highway 5.
00:05:32.700 Their quantities there were beyond what you would expect the residents of Whatcom County to need.
00:05:38.760 That suggests there was a trafficking flow.
00:05:42.500 There's also Okanagan County where there was a relatively big seizure, but that was a Mexican-run organization.
00:05:47.380 That appears just to be a Mexican organization that happened to be supplying people who live close to the Canadian border,
00:05:56.700 including people in First Nations reservations.
00:05:59.340 And then the most interesting really was Alaska.
00:06:03.100 And we had never thought about it before, but where should Alaska get its fentanyl?
00:06:08.420 Well, I mean, preferably nowhere.
00:06:10.940 No, good answer.
00:06:12.580 Good answer.
00:06:13.500 But it's not easy to drive a car from Mexico to Alaska directly.
00:06:20.400 So it's in some sense not too surprising that Alaska would perhaps be getting its fentanyl from Canada.
00:06:28.480 But there aren't many people who live in Alaska.
00:06:30.880 It's not a big market.
00:06:33.080 You mentioned Mexican cartels, and I've learned from our politicians that that is a term that gets the Mexican government's backup.
00:06:40.960 They don't like that.
00:06:42.600 I guess none of us would like our country being associated with it, but they are cartels from Mexico, and there are Chinese triads coming in. 0.95
00:06:50.300 And I just learned recently about the Cahen cartel out of Ireland that now operates in Dubai.
00:06:57.520 All of these groups are there, and can we assume that if it was Mexican cartel fentanyl in somewhere like Okanagan County on the Canada-U.S. border,
00:07:06.900 that it came from Mexico or that it came from the cartel operations in Canada?
00:07:11.460 Because they've set up in your country.
00:07:14.220 They've set up in my country.
00:07:15.620 I mean, they may have started in Mexico, but they operate across borders.
00:07:21.780 It's a good question.
00:07:22.480 No, we cannot assume.
00:07:24.000 And the nature of the data that we received just pertained to where it was seized.
00:07:28.600 It doesn't have the full route.
00:07:30.540 So it is possible that the drug seized in Okanagan County had been sent from Mexico to Canada and then down into Okanagan County across the border.
00:07:44.000 That is possible.
00:07:44.620 So let's back up a little bit, because I've been watching the rise of fentanyl for over a decade in our most recent mayoral election here in Toronto.
00:07:55.940 Like many major cities, we've got a lot of problems to do with homelessness, encampments, open drug use in the streets, societal decay.
00:08:04.580 And I remember writing a piece that said pretty much all the major issues that we're dealing with, the gun crime, the shootings going up, can be tied back to, in some way, to fentanyl.
00:08:15.540 Prior to fentanyl really taking off across North America in the early aughts, we were dealing with heroin as the main opioid.
00:08:27.100 What makes fentanyl so lucrative and at the same time so addictive for the population?
00:08:35.040 Because we're facing a very different crisis than we were when the opioid of choice was heroin or synthetic heroin.
00:08:41.800 So the short answer is it's cheaper.
00:08:44.620 If you put yourself in the shoes of a high-level trafficker, perhaps in Mexico, and you're in the business of supplying illegal opioids to the North American market,
00:08:54.240 the innovation of distributing fentanyl instead of heroin is just a way to radically reduce your cost of raw materials.
00:09:04.100 The price per morphine-equivalent dose is the jargon.
00:09:08.900 Let me explain that.
00:09:10.000 So there are many different opioids, everything from codeine to fentanyl and carfentanil.
00:09:14.540 They're broadly similar but of different potencies, so we need a common unit to convert one to the other, and it's called a morphine-equivalent dose.
00:09:23.420 The cost per morphine-equivalent dose for the high-level traffickers is maybe 1% with fentanyl, what it was with heroin.
00:09:30.940 So they just seized on the opportunity to save money.
00:09:34.740 And also, it's more compact, so it's easier to smuggle.
00:09:37.700 It's synthetic, so you can produce it quickly if it sees a lot of advantages for them.
00:09:42.080 And the main reason why things are worse is the price on the street has dropped by 90%,
00:09:48.580 and people are using way more than they used to.
00:09:52.820 So you mentioned in your piece for the Manhattan Institute how changing the price point can really alter an opioid market,
00:10:04.780 and you pointed to the early 70s.
00:10:07.680 I think one of them was the French Connection.
00:10:09.700 I'm not talking about the movie.
00:10:11.020 It was an actual event.
00:10:11.980 Explain how that worked back then, and why trying to interrupt these supply chains matters if you're going to try and solve the problem of the opioid addiction.
00:10:23.300 So back in the day, a lot of the heroin consumed in the United States was produced in the Middle East
00:10:29.800 and passed through Marseille, France, on the way to New York City and Montreal.
00:10:36.100 And there were simultaneous actions both against the production in the Middle East and also against the French Connection.
00:10:44.960 And yeah, the movie is based on real events.
00:10:47.320 And because that pathway accounted for such a large share of heroin entering North America,
00:10:56.420 breaking that route made a substantial difference.
00:11:00.540 So for a year or two or a shade more, there was a relative scarcity.
00:11:06.820 Prices spiked triple or quadruple what they had been,
00:11:11.620 and that kind of broke the back of the heroin epidemic that got started in the late 1960s.
00:11:17.260 So the shortage didn't last forever,
00:11:19.880 but by the time the supply networks had reconstituted and developed other pathways,
00:11:26.300 the momentum of that earlier heroin epidemic had been broken.
00:11:31.720 And so similar actions today could do the same thing,
00:11:35.440 although this seems far more widespread than the heroin epidemic of the 1960s, early 70s.
00:11:42.660 You are correct.
00:11:43.300 It is more widespread back then New York City.
00:11:46.720 And there was this New York City-Montreal connection going on.
00:11:50.320 This is part of the reason why so many Canadians got their backs up when Donald Trump said that they're part of it.
00:11:57.640 And I thought, why would you get your back up instead of investigate?
00:12:00.280 If you know anything about the New York City drug market, Montreal has been supplying it for decades,
00:12:06.700 whether it was the French Connection or the Rizzuto crime family in the 90s and early 2000s.
00:12:13.320 In fact, I'm in the process of listening to this wonderful long series of podcasts on Canadian history.
00:12:20.180 I think it's 250 lectures in total.
00:12:22.260 And there were stories about smuggling and border crossing to evade taxes in the late 18th and early 19th century.
00:12:38.460 This had to do with evading customs duties and also figuring out the least expensive way to move furs from the interior to the European markets.
00:12:53.920 So, you know, the geography makes it make sense, right?
00:12:57.580 The Hudson River Valley goes up and connects to Lake Champlain, which connects to Rishulu River.
00:13:02.200 It's actually been a transportation corridor, who knows, back almost to the time of Samuel D. Champlain.
00:13:10.220 So the Montreal-New York corridor, you were going to say that back then New York City was smaller.
00:13:17.020 I'm sorry.
00:13:18.280 Back then, New York City dominated the North American market.
00:13:23.260 You were right.
00:13:23.780 The market is just bigger and it's more diffuse.
00:13:25.940 We could talk a little bit about why.
00:13:27.740 The other big changes are technology today.
00:13:31.720 At one time, it was not easy to have a phone conversation with somebody a continent away.
00:13:38.060 Now, 12-year-old kids are playing video games with people they've never met on three different continents.
00:13:44.860 So the communication capability, including encrypted communication, makes it so much easier to coordinate transcontinental shipments.
00:13:53.340 And the drug trafficking usually hides within legitimate flows of people and goods.
00:14:01.760 And international trade and international movements of people are just massively greater than they were, say, before the end of the Cold War.
00:14:09.200 So it is way easier to move the stuff around.
00:14:13.200 And that makes it much harder for law enforcement to create a sustained disruption.
00:14:18.080 On the other hand, we are perhaps seeing one right at this moment, right?
00:14:21.600 But for the last 18 months or so, the fentanyl markets in both Canada and the United States seem to have been substantially shocked.
00:14:30.380 Prices, there's less availability.
00:14:33.560 There's fewer overdoses.
00:14:35.340 We may be right at this moment in the middle of a shortage, relative shortage.
00:14:41.080 Before we get into potential enforcement measures, let's talk about how big this business is.
00:14:46.800 I was writing the other day on a gentleman out of Vancouver area, Opinder Singh Sayan, who was arrested in Nevada.
00:14:58.340 He had been, I guess, caught up in a stain operation by the Drug Enforcement Agency that started out of their office in Ankara, Turkey.
00:15:11.460 Put them in touch, put their confidential source that they wanted to plant into this international ring in touch with people who eventually put the confidential source in touch with Cyan in Surrey,
00:15:22.440 who's promising to bring in fentanyl precursors from Hong Kong and mainland China through Vancouver or directly to the port of Long Beach, just outside Los Angeles.
00:15:35.560 There are connections to the aforementioned Cyan Irish drug cartel.
00:15:42.480 So you've got China, Turkey, the United States, Canada, China, Australia, and Australia because, yes, they were shipping fentanyl into the United States either directly or through Canada and moving methamphetamine from Montreal through the port in Long Beach to Australia.
00:16:03.380 These are big networks. How big is this business these days? Not this particular group, because you may not be able to answer that.
00:16:11.200 But overall, this is big and lucrative business, isn't it?
00:16:15.420 A hundred percent. So the United States used to have this series of studies called What American Users Spend on Illegal Drugs.
00:16:23.680 Unfortunately, they stopped updating the series. So the last year for which we have that data where it's a comprehensive estimate is 2016, but at that time was $150 billion a year that people who consume drugs were spending buying those illegal drugs.
00:16:42.600 It's $150 billion. Now, most of that actually stays with the lower level dealers. It's a little bit paradoxical, but those street dealers who are not themselves very wealthy get a lot of that because the prices get bumped up each step of the distribution chain.
00:16:59.360 But when you're talking about the level that you're speaking of, those high-level traffickers at that time, that would have been a $15 or $20 billion a year activity supporting U.S. markets.
00:17:11.360 And, you know, in round terms, Canada is about one-eighth the population of the United States.
00:17:18.040 It wouldn't be surprising to me if the dollars involved in the Canadian market aren't roughly one-eighth what they are in the U.S. market.
00:17:25.780 So the multibillion-dollar operation just for North America, excluding Mexico, even though technically, back to the geography lesson, they are part of North America.
00:17:35.620 Yeah, and some of that $150 billion that American drug users were spending to buy drugs would be flowing back into Mexico.
00:17:44.680 But so you would, I mean, given that fentanyl is lower, has the price or the amount that people are spending overall gone down?
00:17:54.320 Yeah, a bit.
00:17:55.260 Or is it just more widespread and so omnipresent that it's gone up?
00:18:02.280 It's an excellent question.
00:18:03.720 It's a really good question.
00:18:04.760 So in very, very round terms, the price per morphine equivalent dose, remember that's that unit that allows us to compare across opioids, has dropped by like 90%.
00:18:13.500 And the number of morphine equivalent doses that the daily or near-daily user who has opioid use disorder is consuming has gone way up, maybe five times as much as before.
00:18:29.400 So paradoxically, when you get this much cheaper drug, it's actually not increasing the dollar value of the market from those traditional users.
00:18:39.460 But one of the things that fentanyl did is it expanded the user base.
00:18:45.200 In the old heroin era, it was mostly injected, and a lot of people don't want to put a needle in their arm.
00:18:51.940 But the fentanyl now is also distributed as counterfeit pills, and there are a lot of people who are willing to take a pill who would not want to inject.
00:19:03.380 Well, and then once they get addicted, my understanding is it turns to crushing the pills and injecting them, which has all kinds of medical ramifications that I've spoken to doctors about that just give me the heebie-jeebies.
00:19:17.760 So how does the business work, and why do, you know, instead of shipping fentanyl from China, which they used to do, and it's funny, we used to complain about fentanyl coming in from China to Canada by mail.
00:19:33.380 Now, one of the complaints for how fentanyl gets from Canada to the United States and perhaps not caught at the border, and you allude to this a bit, is packages that don't come across the land border.
00:19:45.340 You know, some of it's coming in by mail to the U.S. as well.
00:19:49.060 But that's how they used to do it.
00:19:50.760 Why are they now shipping precursors and having people make it at super labs either in the States or just across the Mexican border or in Canada?
00:19:59.200 How does all of this work?
00:20:01.980 Well, the short answer is we believe China did crack down on the fentanyl itself.
00:20:10.320 And so the players in China shifted to making the precursors.
00:20:19.060 And this is not an uncommon...
00:20:21.060 These are just ingredients?
00:20:23.760 No.
00:20:24.800 I mean, yes and no.
00:20:26.280 So a metaphor I use sometimes is baking a cake that's got frosting on it.
00:20:32.440 And one image of producing cakes is you start with flour and sugar and egg.
00:20:39.280 But another thing you can do is you could buy an unfrosted cake and then just add the frosting.
00:20:44.300 A lot of these fentanyl precursors are more like the cake without the frosting.
00:20:49.760 And then the only thing you need to do is add the frosting.
00:20:52.600 So some of the precursors allow that final processing step to be relatively easy.
00:21:04.520 So these can be super labs by quantity and importance, but they're not always super labs by technical sophistication.
00:21:13.180 If you visit a super lab, you would not mistake it for an actual pharmaceutical company's lab in terms of...
00:21:21.520 But the photos and videos I've seen, it doesn't look like a James Bond villain went in there with one of these super clean things.
00:21:27.700 You're talking about pails that you would get at Home Depot or the pickle pail from your local restaurant is what this stuff is made in.
00:21:35.620 Yes, and the person who's staffing that can either be just a trained laborer or in Mexico, it's not uncommon that they'll recruit somebody with, say, a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
00:21:47.380 They're not needing someone PhD trained, but sometimes it's useful to have someone who has some skill in a lab.
00:21:55.420 One of the reasons why fentanyl stuck this time around, I should back up.
00:22:00.560 There have been three or four previous instances in which fentanyl threatened to penetrate the U.S. market before what we're seeing now started, as you say, about 10 years ago.
00:22:10.980 Those earlier attempts were cut short because law enforcement got on top of it before it spread.
00:22:18.820 And one of the reasons it was easier to control then is that the synthesis methods required more technical sophistication.
00:22:27.260 For instance, they might require you to control the temperature and pressure of the reactor vessel during the synthesis.
00:22:35.060 But then simpler synthesis methods were discovered and the recipes disseminated on the Internet.
00:22:42.240 And now it is much closer to just mixed chemicals, not having to put them in a reactor that has a controlled temperature and pressure.
00:22:52.340 So, yeah, they're not super sophisticated.
00:22:54.180 But I never underestimate the resourcefulness of the criminal element.
00:23:00.460 Absolutely.
00:23:00.720 They're creative.
00:23:01.420 They adapt.
00:23:02.520 A lot of the resourcefulness is in the distribution.
00:23:06.920 It's in how do you locate and communicate with that person 3,000 miles away and who is not a trustworthy partner.
00:23:15.780 So you referred to this particular case.
00:23:19.100 One of the things that's fun about that is they're using dollar bills and the serial number on dollar bills as a way of validating that the person that they're meeting with is the same person they're talking with.
00:23:32.020 So that's kind of clever.
00:23:33.760 But it is not the production itself that is the most challenging part of the operation.
00:23:41.720 Let's talk more about that case when we come back.
00:23:45.920 We'll take a quick break here.
00:23:47.220 More in moments.
00:23:47.900 This is Tristan Hopper, the host of Canada Did What?, where we unpack the biggest, weirdest, and wildest political moments in Canadian history you thought you knew and tell you what really happened.
00:23:59.940 Stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes.
00:24:04.380 If you don't want to stick around, make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What? everywhere you get podcasts.
00:24:10.260 So, Professor Calkin, you mentioned just before the break this document that we both read.
00:24:16.200 It's the affidavit attached to the arrest warrant that was issued for Opinder Singh Cyan out of Surrey, British Columbia.
00:24:25.420 And a lot of interesting tidbits.
00:24:28.820 You know, first off, the nicknames of the people in this, Queen and Burger and things like that, AAA and Triple K.
00:24:35.740 You know, that's interesting.
00:24:38.820 And if you're writing a movie about this, those would be some good elements to pull.
00:24:43.020 But for a meetup, and this wasn't to do with fentanyl, this was to do with meth, but these networks trade in all the drugs.
00:24:50.480 You know, they were also trading in cocaine as well.
00:24:52.780 I'm sure there are others that just weren't mentioned.
00:24:55.180 And the way that you would validate that you were the right person for the pickup is by citing a serial number from a dollar bill.
00:25:06.060 In another instance, they were unsure that the shipment of meth was still in the custody of the person they had given it to to sell it to the Australians.
00:25:16.880 And so they said, we want to see a photo of you with this, holding today's edition of the LA Times.
00:25:24.380 Seems unsophisticated in some ways, but these are the methods they're going to to try and coordinate and ensure that they're not being tripped up by law enforcement, which they obviously were in this case.
00:25:36.620 Not being tripped up by law enforcement, but also not being tripped up by each other.
00:25:39.800 One of the occupational risks of being a criminal is you're working with other criminals who are not necessarily reputable.
00:25:46.780 So to stereotype 10 and 20 years ago, the trust challenge.
00:25:52.100 How do I trust a business partner when it's an illegal transaction and they could always just pull a gun and steal the money that I brought or steal the drugs that I brought, depending on which side of the transaction I am?
00:26:03.280 Or even more, how do I trust that if I send a shipment thousands of miles, the person receiving is going to pay?
00:26:12.920 Or if you're the buyer, the seller might say, pay me first, but you as the buyer say, why should I pay you first?
00:26:19.300 You might never ship the stuff.
00:26:20.580 So there's a trust challenge.
00:26:22.800 In olden times, the trust challenge was solved primarily by working within ethnic groups and often within families.
00:26:31.380 Sometimes by literally taking hostages.
00:26:34.780 So the South American groups might send someone from their family into the United States to make sure they didn't go rogue.
00:26:44.240 They would generously host that person's family at their compound.
00:26:50.020 And if the person they sent to the United States ended up going rogue or whatever, then they have hostages.
00:26:58.960 So those are like the old ways the drug trafficking networks worked.
00:27:03.880 And it worked well enough, but it did limit to some degree the flows to operating on kind of traditional pathways and places where there were members of the same ethnic group on both sides of the international border.
00:27:16.560 What we're seeing now with improved electronic communication is what you were referring to, these crazy mixes of many different nationalities in many different locations, trading in many different drugs.
00:27:29.160 But they still have to solve that trust problem.
00:27:31.800 And so the things you're talking about are some of the ways they try to deal with the trust problem when they're no longer working within ethnic and family ties.
00:27:42.660 Yeah, it can sound like a bit of a joke if you put it the right way.
00:27:46.100 You know, an Irishman, a Turk, and a Mexican walk into a Chinese bar.
00:27:51.680 You're set.
00:27:52.460 You're right.
00:27:52.760 It's very cinematic.
00:27:54.100 And now you've decided you can make this a comedy action thriller.
00:27:58.700 I think you've got something going there.
00:28:00.180 It's, well, it isn't what you would have expected years ago.
00:28:05.720 You know, look, people can make fun of the movies and the books by people like Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, but there were accuracies in them.
00:28:16.520 Yeah, yeah.
00:28:16.900 Although that book and that movie, they were, they did a pretty good job of capturing it.
00:28:23.060 The bloodlines and how close you were and were you from the same neighborhood, that that was all true.
00:28:29.740 And now I was reading this affidavit by Officer Polito and just my mind was blown.
00:28:37.980 It is a very different setup.
00:28:41.180 So you've got the Sinaloa cartel out of Mexico, the Kahane's out of Dublin via Dubai, and various organized crime elements in Canada and the United States buying from China. 0.88
00:28:54.400 Which element is driving this?
00:28:56.680 Is it the consumer or, I mean, there'd been some political talk that it was a Chinese political decision to flood North America with fentanyl.
00:29:07.540 That this is part of their, their overall strategy of, of domination is to, you know, if, if we, they can undermine the United States through this, then it helps them economically and eventually geopolitically militarily.
00:29:22.580 So to answer the first part, at one level, it is ultimately demand driven.
00:29:26.200 One of the things that's been fascinating in my research life for the last year is we've assembled experts on 10 different major illegal markets, not just drugs, but also money laundering, commercial sex, human smuggling.
00:29:39.060 And they're all basically demand driven in the sense that the trafficking organizations don't have big marketing departments purchasing television ads, or they aren't trying to push their illegal product or service on the consumer.
00:29:58.720 So at some level, it's, it's demand driven.
00:30:01.460 Um, your speculation that this was a plot by China, I don't know.
00:30:09.180 I certainly, I don't live in that Politburo.
00:30:11.940 My best guess, and it's only a guess is it wasn't something they planned way ahead of time.
00:30:17.720 But once they realized it was happening, they were like, okay, this is, this is something that we will only crack down on somewhat grudgingly and to avoid the embarrassment of being the world's drug producer.
00:30:33.980 They did take action in 2019 against the fentanyl itself, which forced the market to shift to precursors.
00:30:39.700 They have taken some action within the last year or two also.
00:30:44.100 Um, but, uh, I, I don't know.
00:30:46.840 There was a drop and you, you allude to that in your piece for the Manhattan Institute.
00:30:51.840 There was a drop in, uh, opioid overdose deaths.
00:30:55.520 I followed the British Columbia coroner's, um, monthly updates and I, I didn't realize that that was why there was a dip in 2019, the only year that went down.
00:31:06.820 And, um, right now I think we're probably headed to a, uh, maybe a slight decrease this year.
00:31:15.820 But, um, uh, still well above where things had been.
00:31:20.180 It's, you know, it'd be lower than previous record years.
00:31:23.420 So, you know, there's the good and the bad on that.
00:31:26.300 Uh, you mentioned money laundering and I'd like to ask you about that.
00:31:31.640 Um, if we're not a big player in supplying, what's Canada's role in money laundering?
00:31:37.940 And we know that one of our big banks got their knuckles wrapped, uh, by American authorities, TD, which is, you know, it's a Canadian bank, but wow, it's pretty big along the U S Eastern seaboard now.
00:31:49.320 Um, and then we've got what are called the, uh, the Vancouver model for money laundering that's since been moved to Toronto.
00:31:57.700 I can tell you the price of real estate is, uh, is not doing well in part due to this part due to other issues, but how big is the money laundering here?
00:32:06.560 If, if, if we're not selling the drugs, are we helping the cartels and the triads get their profits?
00:32:14.620 Um, very possibly.
00:32:16.340 So however, however difficult it is to have the global picture on what's going on with the drug trafficking, it's even harder to have really good data on the global picture of money laundering.
00:32:28.820 Uh, but it does seem, uh, plausible to me that Canada's role in the money laundering side is relatively larger than, well, it's almost certainly going to be larger than Canada's role in having fentanyl shipments reach the United States because the quantity, uh, coming from Canada to the United States is so small.
00:32:50.380 A lot of that money laundering, the drive on the money laundering does come from two sides.
00:32:58.600 One is it's criminal organizations in the final market countries like Canada, the United States having cash that they need to, to, to launder.
00:33:09.220 The other big driver is people in China wanting to get money out of the country.
00:33:14.240 Um, so the currency controls in China create the other side of that.
00:33:22.660 There's a lot of people in China who'd be thrilled to acquire assets in North America.
00:33:29.980 Yeah.
00:33:30.540 You can't necessarily leave with your money, but you can buy a house in North America.
00:33:35.140 Yeah.
00:33:35.840 And, and then you can buy a house that needs to be fixed up and then you can pay the contractors with the cash, which may have, um, less than savory origins.
00:33:47.800 Yep.
00:33:49.920 Okay.
00:33:50.440 So let's talk about enforcement and what can be done.
00:33:55.040 You, you mentioned that, you know, the, the tariff issue and whether that should be done, that's a political thing and not within your realm.
00:34:03.180 Um, but in terms of enforcement for getting a hold of this, and it is a scourge on both sides.
00:34:10.460 I believe we've lost more people to opioid deaths driven primarily by fentanyl in the last decade than we lost in all of the second world war.
00:34:18.620 That's significant.
00:34:20.120 It's huge.
00:34:21.400 What in, you know, similar numbers for the United States.
00:34:26.160 So this is something that we should all be taking seriously, be trying to get a hold of.
00:34:31.280 Beyond the deaths, there is the, the life's destroyed, but still lived and the impact on communities.
00:34:38.560 So how, what are effective methods for interrupting those supply chains?
00:34:47.280 Rather than talk about tactics, the, just talk to a law enforcement officer about the tactics, but let's talk about the objectives or strategy or the vision for what law enforcement can do.
00:34:58.080 And I would say there's sort of four schools of thought.
00:35:00.600 One school of thought is supply control is, is hopeless, worthless.
00:35:03.720 The market will always respond and it'll respond essentially immediately.
00:35:07.620 All resources should just go on the demand side to treatment, harm reduction, and so on.
00:35:11.700 That's one school of thought.
00:35:12.900 I'm not that pessimistic.
00:35:14.900 At the other extreme are the people who have what I think is wildly naive hopes and expectations about the ability to, quote unquote, seal the border, um, eliminate the market completely.
00:35:26.800 I don't think that's realistic because these substances are so compact.
00:35:32.720 They're very, very small.
00:35:34.180 They're very easy to hide in it.
00:35:35.720 So those two extremes, I don't think make sense.
00:35:38.500 One other view is to say we can shock a market if we get the right convergence of factors, sort of the perfect storm.
00:35:48.280 And if that shock lasts a year or a year and a half so that the number of people dying drops by 25% for a year, year and a half, that's thousands of lives.
00:36:00.840 And let's just say that's what we're trying to do.
00:36:03.380 So that's sort of shock the market approach.
00:36:05.760 The fourth idea is to say in 2025, it's really hard even to shock the market, let alone to shut it down.
00:36:15.620 But what we can do is focus on the organizations that are most destructive, that create the most collateral harm.
00:36:24.820 And this is a story that's easy to tell with regard to Mexico today.
00:36:29.400 The organizations in Mexico are absolutely destructive to the fabric of Mexican society. 0.97
00:36:37.220 They kidnap and kill people. 0.98
00:36:41.220 I mean, they kidnap people for profit. 0.97
00:36:43.060 They kill journalists to intimidate the press.
00:36:46.320 They corrupt politicians.
00:36:49.100 That's causing destruction in society above and beyond just the distributing the drugs.
00:36:55.260 So this fourth school of thought says, let's not put all drug traffickers in the same bin.
00:37:02.220 Let's recognize that some of them are truly horrible in how they conduct their business and others are just trying to conduct their business.
00:37:13.040 And to say that the mission of law enforcement is to make sure that these powerful and wealthy organizations are not undermining democratic institutions, are not intimidating journalists, and so on.
00:37:25.500 So those are four schools of thought.
00:37:27.380 And I tend to be in the third and the fourth.
00:37:30.100 In terms of the third, as you were talking about shocking the market, one of the things that I was thinking about is that if we were to try that in certain parts of Canada, and I'm sure if you went to Portland or other parts of Oregon, you might have the same issue.
00:37:45.820 We have gone so far down the harm reduction only rabbit hole that part of the illicit opioid supply now comes from harm reduction.
00:37:58.100 Our elected officials and public health officials tried to deny this for years, but Thunder Bay, Ontario, way up north, is now supplied by harm reduction dillies coming out of London, Ontario.
00:38:10.460 These pills, 8 mg diloploid, handed out like a PEZ dispenser, finding their ways up to northern Ontario because they aren't flooded with the market up there, and it's very lucrative.
00:38:22.160 Or in British Columbia, it's being fed into the Calgary market.
00:38:26.340 That creates new opioid addicts who then eventually go to fentanyl.
00:38:30.980 And my thought was, if we keep doing this and then try and shock the market to interrupt, I don't think that it would make a difference.
00:38:39.620 I believe in the four pillars of dealing with illicit drugs, which includes harm reduction, but I don't believe that harm reduction is the only way to go, and that's where some of our leadership has been over the past several years.
00:38:56.360 Yeah, and let's be clear, harm reduction is a big tent concept that has many different specific programs in it.
00:39:04.840 So, for instance, naloxone distribution wouldn't have any of the effects you're talking about because naloxone just blocks an opioid, it doesn't trigger the opioid receptors.
00:39:15.440 You're really referring more specifically to this prescribed safer supply concept, which is tremendously controversial and very strong opinions on all sides of this.
00:39:26.680 But one way to think about this is the real question is, do you supervise the consumption of the opioids that are being given by the medical system?
00:39:38.920 With methadone in the United States, historically, we said, yes, we'll provide you with this other opioid called methadone, but you have to consume it on site.
00:39:50.020 And the reason was, there was a secondary illegal market in diverted methadone when people were allowed to take home in large quantities.
00:40:00.980 And at some level, it's like not surprising.
00:40:02.980 If the government gives away for free anything that has a resale market, it doesn't have to be only opioids.
00:40:11.420 If the government were giving away, I don't know, iPhones, then some people would say, thank you very much, I'm going to resell.
00:40:20.920 And the temptation for reselling with prescribed safer supply is that those pills that are a controlled pharmaceutical dose sell for about triple per morphine equivalent dose what the unreliable illegal opioids sell for.
00:40:39.320 So you could get a number of pills and then sell it for a number of dollars that allowed you to buy three times as many morphine equivalent doses of illegal opioids, mostly fentanyl, as the number of morphine equivalent doses that you receive from prescribed safer supply.
00:40:56.240 So at some level, there's an arbitrage opportunity there.
00:40:59.500 And unless you supervise the consumption, some people are going to...
00:41:04.760 Which we don't.
00:41:05.660 My understanding is that also is contested.
00:41:10.080 I have had people tell me that very little of it is supervised.
00:41:14.040 Then I repeated those words and got yelled at by somebody who said, oh, no, no, it's all supervised.
00:41:19.860 There are a lot of strong feelings about that.
00:41:23.560 But it's been a fascinating conversation, Professor Calkins.
00:41:27.000 I really do appreciate it.
00:41:29.320 I appreciate your interest.
00:41:30.320 There's been a lot of political points back and forth, and I think everyone's just trying to make themselves look best.
00:41:36.820 You actually have the data, and we appreciate that.
00:41:40.260 And your insights into illegal supply chains, which I just find fascinating.
00:41:44.280 It's been a wonderful profession for opportunities like this.
00:41:48.200 And yes, it's a fascinating area.
00:41:50.600 Criminals are fun to study.
00:41:52.620 Thanks for the time.
00:41:53.580 We'll talk soon.
00:41:54.800 Have a good day.
00:41:55.300 Full Comment is a post-media podcast.
00:41:57.400 My name's Brian Lilly, your host.
00:41:58.900 This episode was produced by Andre Pru.
00:42:00.940 Theme music by Bryce Hall.
00:42:02.780 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.
00:42:04.920 Please remember to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, wherever you get them.
00:42:10.800 And help us out by leaving us a rating and a review.
00:42:13.600 Thanks for listening.
00:42:14.560 Until next time, I'm Brian Lilly.
00:42:16.180 Here's that clip from Canada Did What?
00:42:25.860 I promised you.
00:42:30.060 Castro would end up occupying a space in the Trudeau family similar to that of a beloved uncle.
00:42:36.260 They went diving.
00:42:37.600 They smoked cigars together.
00:42:39.640 They gathered sea urchins for beach cookouts.
00:42:41.940 Informal talks at an island hideaway intensified their respect for each other.
00:42:47.940 And their mutual enjoyment of skin diving added to the rapport.
00:42:51.780 In addition to a well-publicized 1976 summit meeting, Trudeau took three separate vacations to visit Castro after his time in politics had ended.
00:43:00.960 I can make, you know, just one reference to Pierre Trudeau's sons to show the closeness of their relationship.
00:43:12.440 The nickname that the Trudeau's sons had for Fidel Castro was Papa Fidel.
00:43:17.680 So that gives you an indication of the closeness of the bond that existed between a communist dictator, you know, thorn in the side of every American administration for the past 50 years, and Pierre Trudeau.
00:43:32.720 When Trudeau's youngest son, Michel, died in an avalanche in 1998, Castro called the family in tears to express his condolences.
00:43:41.740 As an eight-year-old, Michel had referred to Fidel Castro as his best friend.
00:43:46.920 When Pierre died, Fidel declared three days of mourning in Cuba and flew to Montreal to act as an honorary pallbearer.
00:43:53.720 Every time Trudeau went down to Cuba, all the people in South Florida, you know, the exiles were thinking, why is this Western leader giving comfort to a murderous dictator, you know, who is oppressing their people in Cuba?
00:44:10.360 And saying, you know, good things about Fidel Castro.
00:44:13.560 And as I've mentioned, to have him in the pew at Trudeau's funeral in the front row as a dignified person when he had been such a brutal leader says more about Pierre Trudeau than it does about Fidel Castro.
00:44:33.600 Here's where we should probably touch on what Castro had done, and what he was continuing to do while going on beach vacations with the Trudeau family.
00:44:42.800 If you want to hear the rest of the story, make sure you subscribe to Canada Did What? everywhere you get your podcasts.