00:03:41.660It is difficult for someone like me to want to invest, what was that, 15 hours in cooking dinner.
00:03:48.060But now I've got like enough food for the whole week.
00:03:49.940So this is what we do on the long weekends in my household.
00:03:53.380But good to have you tuned into the show.
00:03:55.620We'll talk a little bit later on about this rather stark realization of the safe supply
00:04:01.220or so-called safe supply program in my own city.
00:04:04.580but it's one that you would probably find finding similar to in communities across the country.
00:04:09.960We'll talk about that with Adam Zeevo.
00:04:11.920And also want to talk a little bit about this weird national export of the carbon tax.
00:04:18.760The government is not just wanting to make sure Canadians are subject to the carbon tax,
00:04:23.660but is wanting to promote and push the carbon tax all around the world.
00:04:27.360So we'll talk about that with our good friend Chris Sims,
00:04:29.400who returns for a rare Tuesday update in just about 10 minutes or so.
00:04:33.980But let's first talk about the state of Justin Trudeau's Liberal Party.
00:04:38.400I think last week, it was one week ago today, that we had the definitive ruling of, well, I should say actually no,
00:04:45.700it was a week ago today that Torontonians went to the polls in the Toronto St. Paul's riding.
00:04:50.640It was a week ago Tuesday morning that we got the finding that the Conservative candidate, Don Stewart,
00:04:56.820had been elected the next Member of Parliament for Toronto St. Paul's.
00:05:00.260And I think a lot of people may have optimistically expected that Justin Trudeau would not last until the end of the week, that you could basically do what we did with Liz Truss and the lettuce and just have Justin Trudeau versus a head of lettuce and see who can last longer.
00:05:14.420In that case, the lettuce outlasted Liz Truss.
00:05:16.980But I think Justin Trudeau is outlasting the lettuce.
00:05:20.160If someone were to replicate the experiment here, there has been no massive caucus revolt.
00:05:25.680There has been no groundswell of public condemnation from liberal MPs.
00:05:29.740You just had cabinet ministers coming out and saying, yes, our leader has the full confidence in us.
00:05:34.860We have the full confidence in him. Everything is fine. Nothing to see here. Go, go wild.
00:05:39.000It's basically like that meme of I think the dog sitting in the burning building saying this is fine.
00:05:43.960That's basically Justin Trudeau in the Liberal Party of Canada right now.
00:05:48.080There was one letter, one letter signed by one member of parliament, New Brunswick MP Wayne Long, which came out.
00:05:55.620I think it was last Friday. And this letter, which was sent to Liberal caucus members,
00:06:00.360basically had Wayne Long calling on Justin Trudeau to resign, calling on him to step aside
00:06:05.840as Prime Minister, as Liberal leader, and to let someone else lead the party into the next election.
00:06:11.340Now, Althea Raj, who wrote about this in the Toronto Star, said she was told that more
00:06:15.620Liberals were going to sign the letter, that more caucus members were going to,
00:06:19.220and effectively they got cold feet. So MPs are just terrified right now of criticizing Justin
00:06:26.300Trudeau. The Liberal Party has managed to make it so that no one who has frustrations with him
00:06:31.920and his leadership even has an outlet. They're not calling a national caucus meeting. MPs who
00:06:37.040were terrified of speaking up have just decided to be cowed into submission. We had the report
00:06:43.660from justin ling also in the toronto star last week that steven gilbeau this this was fantastic
00:06:49.140by the way so steven gilbeau was at the union station business lounge in toronto so he's waiting
00:06:55.140to get on a via rail train and he's just like openly on the lounge just talking about oh yeah
00:06:59.940so and so wants to get rid of him uh oh yeah we need oh so yeah no we gotta rob all the fan he
00:07:05.020said this about justin trudeau and this mp and this mp and as it happened sitting like i don't
00:07:09.960know, five feet away from him was Justin Ling, who decided to do the grab the low hanging fruit
00:07:16.320of journalism as he should have and just say, you know, start furiously taking notes. And he wrote
00:07:21.000about that. He wrote about just what he was hearing from Stephen Gilboa waiting to board a train
00:07:25.280station in the Via Rail business class lounge. But the amount of damage control that came out
00:07:30.880from the PMO after that, after hearing that call, Gilboa saying, no, this was one sided. He didn't
00:07:36.500hear everything and other MPs saying, oh no, he should have asked me, I would have clarified this.
00:07:41.780The PMO was terrified because they knew that it was evidence of their minister trying to do damage
00:07:48.440control. And then they basically came out and said, oh, we never asked him to do that. No,
00:07:52.440there was no problem. Again, the nothing to see here defense. So the liberals believe that they
00:07:58.940are in an absolutely great place. And because their MPs do not have the temerity, do not have
00:08:04.420the courage or the backbone to stand up to their leader. Justin Trudeau is going to stay on the
00:08:08.560ballot until the next election. I'm convinced of this. And here, I mean, this is why he's doing
00:08:13.520the media rounds now and doing interviews and talking about this as though he knows he's not
00:08:18.680going anywhere. Take a look. In terms of personal contemplation, if there's any discussion or a
00:08:25.180thought for you of a 10th candidate as prime minister, because as I have you, I would be
00:08:31.020remiss if I didn't ask about what has happened in the last week since the by-election in Toronto
00:08:36.660St. Paul's and the calls from caucus members and former cabinet colleagues. They say it's
00:08:42.240time for a new leader. Listen, there's always going to be lots of reflection after a tough
00:08:47.420loss, but there's also so much to do, and I am committed to doing the work of building a better
00:08:53.060Canada every single day. So I look forward to next year's Canada Day, and I look forward to
00:08:57.800many more canada days this is this is the kind of work that we have to remember really really
00:09:04.040matters there are tough days and there are better days but canadians are strong and resilient and
00:09:09.720that's why we keep moving forward i look forward to many more canada days next canada day the
00:09:16.520canada day yeah all the canada days canada day is great oh by the way i'm not going anywhere
00:09:20.500he says he's committed to staying on and of course why would he feel like he's going anywhere he
00:09:25.540Justin Trudeau is like the guy in the movies who any movie it happens in many many movies
00:09:31.000who everyone thinks is up against the wall the police know they've got him and they're wondering
00:09:36.340why this guy is so cocky because they don't realize that someone has like broken into the
00:09:40.300evidence locker and destroyed the key piece of evidence so he knows he knows that he's won
00:09:45.060and that's the case of Justin Trudeau right now he is coming out here and he is making all of
00:09:50.640these claims of him staying on because he knows that his party is not going to get rid of him.
00:09:56.080He knows that Wayne Long is the entirety of the so-called resistance against Justin Trudeau
00:10:01.860because all these other people that were going to sign the letter have just been
00:10:05.160stunned into submission. They've been scared, they've been threatened, whatever. And again,
00:10:09.540these are very short-sighted liberal MPs because so many of them know they're going to lose the
00:10:13.720next election. So what power it is that Justin Trudeau wields over them, I have no idea and I
00:10:19.940don't particularly care but it's amazing if you look at their spin it's evolved considerably from
00:10:25.980even last week to now about why they lost Toronto St. Paul's now let's put the map up this is the
00:10:31.080map the electoral map the political map of Toronto as of well Tuesday at 4 44 a.m it's all liberal
00:10:39.220liberal liberal liberal liberal and then blank right in mid I don't know what blank means but
00:10:43.260right in the middle of midtown there is Toronto St. Paul's now represented by a conservative for
00:10:48.040the first time in 31 years now why did the liberals lose well the first couple of days of spin was all
00:10:55.360ministers coming out and saying well yes we're disappointed but we're going to listen and we're
00:10:59.620going to really pay attention and we're going to hear what people want and we're going to
00:11:02.620this is it's now evolved it's now about they're no longer interested in what they did wrong they're
00:11:07.740no longer interested in listening to canadians they're no longer interested in taking stock
00:11:11.980This was Karina Gould, the Liberal cabinet minister, pushing out her own spin.
00:11:17.200Liberal MP suggests party needed stronger ground game in Toronto St. Paul's vote.
00:11:23.260So the reason they didn't win is because they weren't canvassing enough.
00:11:26.760The reason they didn't win is because they didn't have as good a get-out-the-vote effort as the Conservatives did.
00:11:30.900Now, the Conservatives may well have done a tremendous get-out-the-vote effort,
00:11:34.460but getting rid of a riding that you've held for 31 years cannot be blamed on mere ground game.
00:11:40.240The reality is not that they didn't have enough volunteers.
00:11:43.320Leslie Church, the Liberal candidate, was not the problem.
00:11:46.580The problem was Justin Trudeau and the Liberal brand.
00:12:08.060and you see the way that the liberal government has just been so absolutely beleaguered on pretty
00:12:13.560much every file imaginable and you wonder where it's going to go from here and unless liberals
00:12:19.600start to find a backbone and say we don't want you here to their leader to Justin Trudeau
00:12:24.580nothing is going to change now to be clear I am absolutely I don't actually care I don't care
00:12:30.960whether Justin Trudeau is there or they replace him with some seat filler until the next election
00:12:36.320It makes no difference to me, and I don't really think it makes much of a difference to the country, because anyone that would be there to fill his seat, to be an interim prime minister, they're on the same path. There'd be a path dependency from the Liberals under Justin Trudeau, and nothing they do is going to really depart that dramatically from what Justin Trudeau is doing now.
00:12:58.720Now, that being said, I would say that the Liberals, if you look at polling numbers,
00:13:03.140there was that one piece in the National Post today that looked at an Angus Reid poll,
00:13:07.020finding that even if Justin Trudeau were not the leader,
00:13:09.520the electoral fortunes of the Liberals are unlikely to be helped much, if at all.
00:13:14.360Canadians are still not going to vote for the Liberals.
00:13:17.340So if they want to put Dominic LeBlanc or Anita Anand or Chrystia Freeland or Mark Carney or whomever
00:13:45.100One is Justin Trudeau is not going anywhere
00:13:47.100and no one in his party seems to be too bothered by that.
00:13:50.780The other is that the NDP are not interested in having an election. Jagmeet Singh has not yet qualified for his pension, so pay close attention to what happens in February. He might all of a sudden find a bit of a spine come February.
00:14:04.860But what's interesting is that there was another poll showing that NDP voters, only 40% of them, sorry, only 40% of Canadians view the NDP liberal deal as beneficial.
00:14:19.38040% of NDP supporters aren't even convinced it's a good idea.
00:14:22.720So apparently you have just like six in 10 new Democrat voters, new Democrat supporters
00:14:28.560that are happy with selling out their whole party, their whole ideal set for the liberal
00:14:35.020government to keep it in power a little bit longer.
00:14:37.400So NDP voters need to speak up as well and tell Jagmeet Singh they're not too keen on
00:16:15.420They want people in Baku and Tallinn and Paris to pay a carbon tax as well.
00:16:21.480talk to me about this. Yeah. So it's one of those things where I had to take a double take at it
00:16:26.300because I couldn't tell right away if it was 1.7 million or 1.7 billion. And the fact that I didn't
00:16:32.560blink at the difference speaks volumes because they just as easily could have been a billion.
00:16:37.840But in this case, it's 1.7 million dollars with an M. And we found this out through freedom of
00:16:44.320information requests with the federal government through our investigative journalist, Ryan Thorpe
00:16:50.240there in Ottawa. He and Franco dug this up. And yeah, it turns out they've spent around $800,000
00:16:55.940in change or so, Andrew, on bureaucrats keeping seats warm and watering houseplants there in the
00:17:01.780national capital region, trying to promote adopting a carbon tax in other countries.
00:17:07.840And what I find spectacularly sad about this is that they fail. They're really bad at this.
00:17:15.780So not only are they wasting Canadian taxpayers' money on something silly and frivolous, like trying to convince a foreign country to impose a tax on its people, but they're terrible at it.
00:17:28.480Like, I'll just point out the United States of America, it's obviously our closest neighbor, biggest trading partner, huge ally, blah, blah.
00:17:35.620I just finished driving across three states, actually, came home yesterday.
00:17:38.880And they, number one, depending on how you slice it, it really looks like they reduced their emissions under Trump.
00:17:47.280And that is largely because they increased their use of natural gas, reading they do not have a national carbon tax in the United States of America.
00:17:56.840And even though their chirpy little sister up here in Canada has been urging them to do so, they still haven't imposed one on their people.
00:18:04.500So if we can't even convince the United States to have a national carbon tax, why are we wasting money trying to convince countries further afield to do so?
00:18:13.560There are two things that come to mind on this.
00:18:15.900Number one is that talk about a race to the bottom is that, you know, we've been saying to the government, you know, even if Canada were to bring its emissions to zero, it wouldn't amount to a hill of beans because emissions are global.
00:18:26.000So the government says, OK, we'll see you that argument and raise you.
00:18:32.120You can't say we're ignoring the global picture.
00:18:33.880But the other thing, and this is what I think is so key here, the greatest detriment that a carbon, well, one of the greatest detriments a carbon tax poses is that it eliminates any competitive advantage that Canada might have and investing in Canada might have relative to other countries.
00:18:49.120So if you're to say, oh, why would I invest in Canada, which has a carbon tax, when I can invest and open up my factory in, oh, I don't know, in Czech Republic, say, because they don't have a carbon tax.
00:19:00.680The government's trying to make it so that everyone is being punitive, so that everyone is penalizing industry.
00:19:05.980And as you note, other countries are saying, nope.
00:19:10.100Because they know that this is not helping the environment.
00:19:12.740They know it's not reducing emissions because if you start punishing people financially for an essential, OK, heating your home in the winter is essential.
00:29:24.160if you need to close up on someone, uh, better on Chris than on me. So I think we should probably
00:29:29.580just do the whole show with her. I could just, you know, dub it and, you know, we'll go, go that
00:29:33.100way. But, uh, anyway, let's, uh, let's take a moment here. Uh, this is a story that's closer
00:29:38.500to home for me in, I live in, uh, Southwestern Ontario, as many of you well know. And the
00:29:43.660reality is in the city of London, it, uh, we used to just be this nice little quiet, sleepy city
00:29:50.520It was more conservative culturally, not necessarily politically.
00:29:55.080And I remember even a decade ago looking at the drug situation in Vancouver and seeing that as a problem over there.
00:30:01.640And London very quickly became, around that time, 2015-2016, one of the worst cities in terms of a drug problem.
00:30:10.300London was one of the cities that early on embraced needle distribution, crack pipe distribution, all of these other things.
00:30:17.000and all of that is novel and quaint compared to what we're seeing now with the proliferation of
00:30:23.740so-called safe supply now this has been an issue we've talked about at a relatively length well
00:30:29.940we've talked about it at length I had Dr Sharon Koivu on the program a couple of weeks back and
00:30:34.600she used to well she is an addiction medicine physician in London but she used to be a significant
00:30:39.560champion of so-called safe supply and she did what any other scientist and researcher does she
00:30:44.600followed the data. And the data showed her that these things were not only not helping people
00:30:50.560with drug addiction, but they were making things worse. She saw another number of key metrics
00:30:54.720continue to rise and in fact balloon. Well, now we have another report from our friend Adam Zivo,
00:31:01.200who is with the National Post and also is the founder of the Center for Responsible Drug
00:31:06.460policies, the seizure, police seizure of hydromorphone pills skyrocketed 3,000% after
00:31:14.900the city's safe supply or so-called safe supply expansion going back to the year 2020. This is
00:31:22.260massive, a 3,000% increase given that this was finding these hydromorphone tablets were finding
00:31:31.040themselves being diverted to the black market. Police were seeing this, didn't really say
00:31:36.440boo about it, didn't speak up, didn't take aim at any of these policies in any public way. And in
00:31:42.160fact, Adam Zivo, as he's recounted in his article here, he had a heck of a time getting some of the
00:31:47.260information that was necessary from police and getting this disclosure. And there was a former
00:31:52.380London police sergeant who has now become a documentary filmmaker that was trying to do
00:31:57.420similar stuff. He was trying to do research on this and was finding himself getting absolutely
00:32:02.120stonewalled. But in early June, the deputy chief of the London police service, Paul Bastian,
00:32:08.740confirmed to Adam Zeebo that hydromorphone seizures have gone up. Just to put some raw
00:32:13.560numbers on here, in 2019, the London police had fewer than 1,000 tablets seized. In 2020,
00:32:21.080that number had increased sharply. And when you get to 2022, over 30,000, and they're expecting
00:32:28.600this year, it will match or exceed last year. So we have seen a massive, massive increase
00:32:36.000in this. This is just one drug in one city in Canada, but I think there's probably a bigger
00:32:42.900picture here that we'll see. Adam Zivo joins us on the show again. Good to talk to you, Adam.
00:32:47.100let's just talk about this here because diversion is something that there is irrefutable evidence
00:32:53.080it's happening you've pointed to like ads on reddit threads promoting diverted drugs we've seen
00:32:59.420these numbers yet still the activists and advocates of safe supply i i mean in some ways
00:33:04.980pretend it's non-existent at all or when they are confronted with the evidence just downplay it
00:33:10.080considerably but this is not an insignificant increase no i mean like going from 1 000 pill
00:33:16.240sees in 2019 to 30,000 pills sees in 2023 is huge. Most people, when they hear these numbers,
00:33:23.040they don't really have any frame of reference, but we have to remember that just two or three
00:33:27.400of these pills is enough to induce an overdose in an opioid-naive user, such as a teenager.
00:33:33.240So essentially, these 30,000 pills is the equivalent of 10,000 overdoses. And as Dr.
00:33:40.440Sharon Koivu pointed out when I interviewed her for this piece, these seizures represent just a
00:33:44.940drop in the bucket of what is flowing throughout the city overall. So we're looking at probably
00:33:50.480hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pills flowing through London, Ontario because of safer
00:33:55.780supply. Let me just ask you about this, because if you look at one drug, you look at hydromorph
00:34:01.520and you see an increase, it's not all that surprising that if diversion happens, that when
00:34:06.040this product is given an expanded access in a particular point in time, that you're going to
00:34:11.140see an increase of it. My question would be, and I don't know if we have the data on this,
00:34:15.560is there a net increase in drugs in the city or has hydromorph just replaced something else that
00:34:22.120would have been seized had these tablets not been? And in that case, you know, the activists would
00:34:26.480argue maybe it's healthier because this is better for you than some of these other things.
00:34:30.920Well, it's hard to talk about the net number of drugs, net amounts of drugs flowing through a
00:34:35.320city. That's incredibly hard to track. However, from my understanding, Safer Supply has not
00:34:40.460replaced the illicit drug supply, but has in fact only subsidized it. The reason why Safer Supply
00:34:45.640clients sell their drugs in the first place is because hydromorphone, though it may be as powerful
00:34:49.540as heroin, is only about 2% as powerful as fentanyl. And so for a fentanyl user, hydromorphone,
00:34:58.660even in large doses, is useless. So they sell their Safer Supply to buy fentanyl. And if all
00:35:03.940of these Safer Supply clients are purchasing fentanyl and flooding the streets with their
00:35:08.520hydromorphone, that indicates the dental market is still very active and that safe supply is not
00:35:13.080replacing it or mitigating it, but rather is subsidizing it. And I think that's very
00:35:17.160concerning. Now, when we want to look at other metrics that quantify diversion in London,
00:35:24.740Ontario, so Dr. Koivu did do a chart review of her patients in Victoria Hospital. So she reviewed
00:35:30.780200 patient charts between January and June of 2023. And she found that 30% or 33% of the
00:35:38.200patients who were not enrolled in a Safer Supply program, self-reported accessing hydromorphone
00:35:43.400diverted from Safer Supply. Also, CAMH recently released a report that looked at self-reported
00:35:50.580drug patterns or drug use amongst Ontario high school students and middle school students.
00:35:55.760And they do this survey once every two years, and they found that between 2021 and 2023,
00:36:01.080three, the number of students who self-reported using pharmaceutical opioids for non-medical
00:36:08.740reasons skyrocketed by about 70%. And the number of students who said that these opioids were
00:36:14.260easily available also skyrocketed by about 40%. So all of these indicators suggest that there is
00:36:21.980a huge influx into the supply of pharmaceutical drugs. I mean, prices used to, like these pills
00:36:29.480used to cost $20 each. Now they sell for about $1 to $2. And that it's not dissuading people
00:36:35.060from using dangerous substances. It's getting into the hands of kids and hooking them into
00:36:40.240addiction, which then eventually escalates to fentanyl use and then kills them.
00:36:45.280So if a lot of these drug users are offloading hydromorph to buy fentanyl, who's the market for
00:36:52.500hydromorph if a lot of these drug users are getting rid of it because it doesn't do what
00:36:56.520they want it to do. Well, that's the thing that's so pernicious about this diversion is that the
00:37:01.200people who buy this hydromorphone tend to be newer users. Let's look at kids as an example.
00:37:07.060I've interviewed dozens of kids who have told me all about how hydromorphone has become very
00:37:11.840popular in their schools or in their communities. This is predominantly in BC. And they say that
00:37:18.340they weren't aware of how dangerous the drug was, right? They know that heroin is bad and that they
00:37:25.120shouldn't do heroin. And the fact that you often have to inject heroin is a very powerful way to
00:37:31.160dissuade people from experimenting with it. But when a kid is at a party and someone hands them
00:37:36.940a pill and they hear hydromorphone and they have no clue what it means, and they're told that it's
00:37:41.720just a prescription pain medication, which is marketed as safe from the government, they're
00:37:46.480much more likely to try it. And they don't realize what they're getting into until they're already
00:37:51.220addicted uh now that's one group other groups include uh people who are in recovery and who
00:37:59.540have lower opioid tolerances and who know not to mess with fentanyl and not to mess with heroin
00:38:06.180but think that hydromorphone is something that they can handle once again because it's marketed
00:38:11.140as safe and if the drug is so cheap how serious could it be i interviewed an addiction outreach
00:38:17.540worker in ottawa who estimated that 90 percent of safer supply clients in that city divert their
00:38:23.860hydromorphone and he had friends because he used to be a heroin user so he had friends and
00:38:28.020acquaintances who got hooked onto the drug and a common theme was that they thought it was maybe
00:38:34.100as potent as a tylenol 3 which is still an opioid but it's much weaker because the drug was so cheap
00:38:39.140you know it was one dollar a pill so what happened in 2020 that changed this in london so much
00:38:48.420well so safer supply was first piloted in 2016 it was initially marketed as a way to uh help stabilize
00:38:56.900the lives of vulnerable sex workers essentially if we give them the drugs that they want then they
00:39:01.940have fewer reasons to sell their bodies on the streets to make money to buy drugs then it was
00:39:06.580quickly expanded uh to become what we know is safer supply today so it was available to anyone
00:39:12.180really uh who was severely addicted and this was a pilot project and there was a lot of research
00:39:17.860that suggested on paper that it was doing well i mean most of these evaluations and studies were
00:39:22.900incredibly low quality most of them just involved interviewing safer supply clients and asking them
00:39:27.060do you like this program where you get free opioids and when they predictably said yes this
00:39:31.300was framed as objective evidence of success so based on these evaluations safer supply was
00:39:37.060expanded nationally in 2020. The COVID pandemic was used as the impetus for this. Essentially,
00:39:43.700the argument was that we needed new emergency guidelines to provide these drugs to drug users,
00:39:49.300to encourage them to shelter in place, or to prevent them from going into withdrawal or
00:39:53.860overdosing because they couldn't access their normal drug dealers. And then this emergency
00:39:58.740situation was very quickly established as safer supply. As we know today, there was a scope creep,
00:40:04.820much in the same way how we saw a scope creep in London, Ontario. So that expansion hit all of
00:40:12.740Canada and allowed many more pilot programs to open up and regular prescribers to provide safer
00:40:18.720supply. So we saw a huge increase in access and consequently a huge increase in diversion.
00:40:25.620Are you convinced that London is any sort of outlier here or that this is something that if
00:40:30.300were to get the data in other cities would be pretty much an identical uh identical situation
00:40:36.780i would assume that the data is fairly consistent across major cities where safer supply
00:40:41.180is being run uh i actually am very interested in reaching out to different police uh departments
00:40:47.180and asking them for their data hopefully they'll respond uh what i would say is that the data that
00:40:52.700we have coming out of british columbia suggests that there is a huge problem there that is
00:40:57.020uh as bad as if not worse to what we're seeing than in london so earlier this year uh a high
00:41:04.940level official from the bc associations of police who was the deputy chief of the vancouver police
00:41:10.620department testified in parliament that approximately half of the hydromorphone
00:41:15.900that is confiscated in bc or has been confiscated in bc recently can be attributed to safer supply
00:41:22.140and we have to keep in mind that when you look at the numbers approximately five percent of the
00:41:28.220hydromorphone patients in the province are safe supply patients so five percent of these patients
00:41:33.580account for fifty percent of the total seizures so that would require them to divert a truly huge
00:41:40.780amount of safer supply uh to have such an impact on the market it's it's i wouldn't say i'm
00:41:47.820surprised by it but i i'm disappointed that tracking these numbers was not just a given
00:41:53.580when rolling out and developing these programs that the governments that approved these that
00:41:58.140were pushing these didn't just want this information up front that you're having to
00:42:01.820go to police and hope that they hand it over well here's the problem is that safer supply advocates
00:42:08.700and harm reduction researchers often do not want this to be measured uh so they make only wonder
00:42:14.620Well, yeah. So they make only the most cursory attempts to measure diversion. Oftentimes there's studies that measure diversion amount to asking safer supply clients, do you divert your drugs? And if so, why? As if you're going to get an honest response from that, any quantitative studies that exist, which are very scarce to begin with, make no attempt to measure diversion.
00:42:36.780when the Alberta government pushed for tracing elements to be included into safer supply drugs.
00:42:44.580So for example, special chemical indicators, special dyes, special colors, the federal
00:42:50.800government refused, even though this was highly practical, because these kinds of tracers have
00:42:55.080been used in the United States already to track counterfeit drugs. And in fact, Dr. Andrea Sarita,
00:43:01.220who is the founder of the original Safer Supply program in London, who is basically the progenitor
00:43:07.500of Safer Supply and the city's main advocate for Safer Supply, said to parliamentarians earlier
00:43:13.360this year that she opposes putting in tracing elements because these tracing elements would
00:43:18.920be stigmatizing, which is, it's absurd. What kind of mental gymnastics do you need to believe that?
00:43:24.320like as if people would somehow feel stigmatized from taking their pink pills on the streets
00:43:32.180in full public view versus their white pills, let alone the fact that chemical tracers cannot
00:43:38.560be seen by the public. You know, no one's going to notice the worst case scenario, just like,
00:43:43.760you know, put it up to your mouth like this if you really need to. Yeah, it's absurd. And when
00:43:49.460when you have safer supply advocates using such absurd arguments to contest the need for tracing
00:43:57.860elements in safer supply, I think that's suspicious. And I think that we also have to
00:44:03.000keep in mind that many safer supply advocates think that diversion is a good thing. Once again,
00:44:07.560Dr. Andrea Sarita has often defended diversion and has said that, you know, it is better for
00:44:13.740someone to access diverted safer supply than illicit street drugs. But once again, going back
00:44:18.160to my earlier comments. It doesn't seem that people are choosing to use safer supply in lieu
00:44:23.560of illicit street substances. This safer supply is merely adding to the total drug supply
00:44:29.620and creating a very dangerous gateway into harder substances.
00:44:35.120Adam Zivo, great work. As always, the piece in the National Post is, as we've been talking about,
00:44:41.040hydromorphone pills seized in London skyrocket 3,000% after safer supply expansion. Great work,
00:44:47.240Adam thanks for coming on today thanks for having me on the show all right thank you that does it
00:44:52.500for us for today we'll be back tomorrow with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show in just 23
00:44:57.060hours and 15 minutes same time same place hopefully with fewer technical glitches but we'll roll with
00:45:02.540the punches as we always do thank you god bless and good day to you all thanks for listening to
00:45:08.100the Andrew Lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news