Lab creates buzz with news of cocaine production

Someone at Adastra Labs in Langley, B.C., must have been sampling the wares when they announced last Thursday that they would produce, sell, and distribute cocaine.

image: MedlinePlus

The story created a buzz at the Daily Hive (dailyhive.com) where I saw it first.

I was incredulous. My first reaction was that it must be a joke.

But it was no joke. The news was carried by reliable Canadian sites and even in France and the UK.

B.C. Premier Eby said he was “astonished” when he heard the news. He had not been consulted by Health Canada who approved Adastra.

“I find it more than a little bit frustrating that Health Canada is not apparently in line with us in terms of the direction we’re going,” said Eby. “We need to work together on the toxic drug crisis and our response to it.”

Prime Minister Trudeau he was “as surprised as” Eby, He said that the federal government was “working very quickly” with Adastra Labs “to correct the misunderstanding” caused by the company’s statement on commercialization.

My second reaction was that it was a ballsy plan to snub the law just as shops had done by openly selling pot before it was legalized.

B.C. has decriminalized possession the possession of 2.5 grams of drugs, including cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine and morphine. Shops like Adastra were going to dare the cops to arrest them and challenge the stupid decriminalization law, I thought.

The problem with decriminalization is that while possession may be legal, the sale of drugs is not. What sense does it make to possess something you can’t legally buy? Adastra Labs must have been flouting the law to make that absurdity obvious.

Then Adastra Labs revised its original statement. They won’t sell to just anyone.

It turns out that their amended Controlled Drug and Substances Dealer’s Licence does not permit the firm to sell cocaine and other drugs to the general public. Under the Dealer’s Licence, Adastra Labs is only permitted to sell to other licensed dealers who have drugs listed on their licence including pharmacists, practitioners, hospitals for research purposes under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

Confusion aside, the amended licences to Adastra Labs represents progress. Victoria’s Sunshine Earth Labs also has an amended licence to produce, sell and distribute MDMA cocaine, opium and morphine to other licensed dealers.

Sunshine Earth issued a revised statement, saying the company is licensed to conduct activities with these controlled substances “under tight limitations imposed by Health Canada.”

This means that doctors now have access to drugs, including MDMA and psilocybin for psychotherapy on behalf of patients who have serious, treatment-resistant, or life-threatening conditions.

A psychedelics company has received federal approval to use MDMA (ecstasy) to treat patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Numinus, a Vancouver-based health company specializing in psychedelic research, will treat 20 people suffering from PTSD using MDMA-assisted therapy.

The panic that hippies were blowing their minds on mind-warping drugs is subsiding.

Now MDMA and psilocybin are joining other mood-enhancing chemicals that have been legal for years; drugs like Effexor (Venlafaxine), available since 2008, used to treat depression, anxiety and panic attacks.

Advertisement

Prohibition of drugs was a mistake but decriminalization will not stop deaths

How many more people have to die because of a half-baked idea from a century ago?

It all started at the turn of the twentieth century when concoctions of opium were commonly found in medicine chests to treat toothaches, diarrhoea, and coughs. Before antibiotics, doctors used opium to treat diseases such as dysentery, cholera, and tuberculosis.

Many of these concoctions, such as Laudanum, were highly addictive.

laudanum ad in Sears. image: 12 tomatoes

There were two paths that governments could have taken. One would have been to control the potency and purity of opium and sell it through licensed outlets. The other was to make opium illegal.

The choice to make opium illegal was political and racist.

Prime Minister Laurier was looking for his fourth majority in a row in 1908. He heard of the “race riots” in Vancouver and sent his minister of labour, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to investigate.

King found resentment and anger towards Chinese workers. They had been brought to British Columbia to build the Trans Canada railway. With the railway complete and Chinese workers unemployed, white Canadians claimed that they were taking jobs away.

Also, Chinese Canadians were demonized for leading good, white Canadian women astray in “opium dens.” The Chinese were the perfect scapegoats: too many, too shady. Laurier played the race card, was returned to power, and passed the Opium Act in 1908.

The prohibition of substances, such as alcohol, has been a failure ever since.

Drug addiction is a serious problem but it is not criminal. The Opium Act placed the possession of opium in the same category of criminal acts as murder and rape.

Criminal acts are the most serious offenses against society. But drug abuse is an offence against an individual, not society. While drug pushers have bad intentions, drug users don’t intend to do anything criminal.

The state is to blame for not controlling the purity and potency of drugs made available. If not in a fit of moral outrage and attempt to control behaviour that mainly affects personal choice, governments would have made the rational choice to leave drugs legal.

The government’s impulse to control behaviour by making drug use criminal is misguided. Throwing people in jail for trying to ease their emotional or physical pain is a mistake.

So here we are a century later with these anachronistic drug laws. What are we to do?

Vancouver is asking the federal government to approve a plan to decriminalize simple possession of illicit drugs in the city. Mayor Kennedy Stewart said:

“Personal possession and use of drugs is not a criminal justice issue; it is a health issue,” said Stewart. “It is time to end the stigma around substance use, help connect more of our neighbours to health care, and save lives.”

But decriminalization does not make drugs legal. It does not guarantee the purity and potency of drugs, nor does it make them available from licensed vendors. Decriminalization simply makes the offence of drug possession less serious. The drugs are still as deadly.

It was a mistake to make drugs illegal in the first place. It’s a mistake we are living with today. This year, Kamloops has had the highest number of deaths from drug overdoses on record: double the 25 deaths recorded in 2019. And the year’s grim tally is not yet complete.

Three profiles of opioid users

The fish-bowl lives of drug users on the streets of downtown East Vancouver provides an easy, but distorted, window to drug use. That picture is as distorted now as it was 139 years ago when B.C.’s second premier, Amor De Cosmos, headed a commission to investigate opium use.

The window to most drug overdose deaths is closed. Typical victims are single men, in the prime of their life, who die alone from opioids containing fentanyl according to a report from the BC Coroners Service released last Thursday.

Michael Strange. image: Globe and Mail

Even reports of typical deaths are somewhat distorted. For some opioid users, the drug is a godsend. Take the case of Michael Strange. He injured his back while working as a cameraman and found opioids to be the only treatment that provided relief.

“I’ve tried so many different things for my pain,” said Strange. “People say, ‘Have you tried acupuncture?’ Yeah. I’ve had two different kinds of laser therapy. I had doctors and friends say I had to try marijuana. I got the vaporizer and it did nothing for my pain (Globe and Mail, September 7, 2018).”

It wasn’t easy but Michael Strange finally found a doctor who would treat him. Many doctors were “running scared” because they didn’t want to be seen to be contributing to addiction. Now his pain specialist gives him a two-month prescription and before renewing, asks: “Michael, how are you? Are you OK with the drugs? Do you need more? Do you need less?”

Self-medication turned deadly for Chris Willie, a university lecturer with a PhD in environmental physiology from UBC Okanagan. He wrote memoirs about his recovery from fentanyl addiction but he died from an overdose before they were published. With the approval of his family, his memoirs were published in the September, 2018, edition of the Walrus. He describes his mental pain as a child and the calm he found in taking dangerous risks:

“I have never excelled at coping. I was that infant child who hammered his head on the ground when frustrated by anything at all. It must have been embarrassing to parent the son with the ever-present forehead scabs. Perhaps I found it soothing, because, thirty years later, I still find serenity in chaos and derive calm from risk. By fighting to live through near-death situations, I could find the high I needed to briefly escape the pain.”

Like Michael Strange, Emily Wharton lived a productive life with opiates. The twenty-year old opium smoker from Victoria, told a House of Commons Select Committee on Chinese Immigration of her use. The federal committee was initiated by John A. Macdonald in 1879 and headed by B.C.’s second premier, Amor De Cosmos (a.k.a. William Alexander Smith).

Back then, the stereotypical opium user was Chinese. They lured good white women into lives of depravity in opium dens. The real agenda of the committee was to rid Canada of Chinese immigrants.

Wharton’s testimony 139 years ago is recorded in Dan Malleck’s book, When Good Drugs Go Bad. She told the committee that she had been using opium for four years and suffered no ill effects. Wharton testified that opium’s “somnolence and complete rest” left her productive. Chinese men in opium dens treated her well and she objected to the characterization of the dens as depraved. She suggested that if the government legalized opium, “one need not have to come into such holes as this to smoke (p. 102).”

Medical-grade opioids are not the problem. The social stigma of drug use that drives users to overdose, and the lack of pain-treatment specialists, leads mostly young single men to self-medicate, and to die, alone.

Opioid use rises despite crisis

Am I the only one not surprised that the opioid crisis has worsened? Despite the widespread distribution of naloxone kits to save lives from fentanyl overdose. Despite increased prescriptions of methadone to treat addiction.

       opium den

It’s all so predictable. The fuse to the opioid bomb was lit long ago.

I just finished reading Dan Malleck’s thoroughly researched book When Good Drugs Go Bad: Opium, Medicine, and the Origins of Canada’s Drug Laws. He traces the opioid crisis that gripped young Canada at the turn of the twentieth century and led to the Opium Act of 1908.

As now, the problem wasn’t the “recreational” use of opium, but rather the prescribed and drug store concoctions of opium. Laudanum, a tincture of opium, was commonly found in medicine chests to treat toothaches and diarrhea, and as a cough suppressant.

Opium was, and still is, a powerful drug in a doctor’s medicine bag. It was especially useful to treat the illnesses of urbanization before the advent of antibiotics; diseases such as dysentery, cholera, and tuberculosis. Even today, nothing surpasses it as a pain killer.

As now, the crisis then was triggered by drugs other than opium. Cocaine had been introduced as a pain killer. The effect on users was startling different than that of opium and its sister morphine. The concept of “drug fiends” didn’t exist until cocaine came on the scene. Now the term easily applies to crystal meth addicts. Charles Heebner, Dean of the Ontario College of Pharmacy commented in 1906 that the public alarm over drug users was non-existent until “the Cocaine Monster came upon the arena . . . Cocaine proved to be a far more enslaving drug than opium or morphine (p.199 of Malleck’s book).”

The politics of the opium scare were quite different than the reality of the problem. Whereas the medical problem was opium addiction and the crazed effect of cocaine, the politics dwelt on the anti-Asian sentiment, especially in B.C.

Nineteen hundred and eight was a federal election year and Prime Minister Laurier was looking for his fourth majority in a row. In response to “race riots” in Vancouver, Laurier sent his minister of labour, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to Vancouver to investigate.

King found that Chinese workers had been brought to British Columbia to build the railway and there now 16,000 Chinese immigrants and their decedents which amounted to eight per cent of the population of B.C. White Canadians claimed they were taking jobs away. Chinese Canadians were demonized for leading good, white, Canadian women astray in “opium dens.” The Chinese were perfect scapegoats: too many, too shady. Laurier played the race card and was returned to power in 1908.

One hundred and eight years later, nothing much has changed. The opioid problem is characterized by sensational news coverage of ordinary Canadians, many of them in the prime of their lives, being killed in alarming numbers by overdosing on fentanyl.

However, the root of the problem is not the recreational use of opioids but the prescription of opioids by doctors. “Prescriptions for hydromorphone have soared 57 per cent over the past five years (Globe and Mail, March 27, 2017).”

And predictably, the more opioids that are prescribed, the more Canadians get hooked. The problem is compounded as users get habituated and require increased dosages for them to work. So they turn to multiple doctors to get them. Failing that, they turn to the streets and the deadly fentanyl.

The problem is not recent -it’s been going on for generations according to the Globe and Mail. “The problem is particularly challenging for new doctors who have inherited patients on high-dose opioids from a colleague who has retired.”

It feels like 1908 all over again.

 

Legalize heroin and save lives

Legal opiates are being use to adulterate illegal ones with tragic consequences. More than 800 British Columbians were killed in fentanyl-related overdoses last year. Many of them were ordinary Canadians you might find living next door. One of them was my nephew who died a few years ago.

Calgary Herald

They injected what they thought was heroin, or some other illegal drug. If they had injected legal heroin, of known purity and strength, they would still be alive. I’m not naive; they would still be addicted but their quest for bliss would not have ended in death.

It’s a question of harm prevention. Legalization of heroin may seem like a radical idea but not long ago so did giving drug addicts clean needles and a safe place to inject.

Like the prohibition of alcohol, the prohibition of drugs has been a dismal failure. Prohibition simply pushes the drug trade underground. When a trade is unregulated, who knows what junk users will end up taking? Drug manufacturers don’t intend to kill users: it’s bad for business to kill your customers. They just want to maximize profits.

Fentanyl is perfectly legal. It’s prescribed by doctors for controlling pain. Fentanyl is just one the opium family. It turns out that all of them are addictive.

A brief history of legal opiates is a guide to the intersection of illegal ones. Opium from Persian poppies has been used for pain control since the fourth century. Researchers discovered the active components of opium -morphine, codeine and theobain- in the 1800s. In an attempt to find a non-additive painkiller, heroin was derived from morphine. The manufacturer of heroin, Bayer, pulled it from shelves in 1913 once it was found to be addictive.

In the quest for a non-addictive pain killer, Perdue Canada filed a patent in 1992 for OxyContin, a pill that would treat pain “without unacceptable side effects (Globe and Mail, Dec. 30, 2016).” Perdue encouraged doctors to prescribe the pill and soon it was a blockbuster hit with billions of dollars being made.

But OxyContin turned out to have terrible side effects and thousands of were hooked. Canadians consume more prescription opiates on a per-capita basis than any other country in the world according to a United Nations report.

As in all opiates, those hooked on OxyContin become habituated so that they needed more pills to control pain. Purdue attempted to control the problem with the replacement OxyNEO in 2012, a tamper-resistant alternative that is difficult to crush, snort or inject. And that same year, the provinces stopped paying for both opiates.

Both factors drove addicts to the streets to find a fix. Illegal drug manufacturers care not how their clients get hooked, whether it be from the pursuit of bliss or the relief of pain.

Fentanyl is now the universal opiate. Manufactured in China in concentrated form, it can be ordered on the internet and sent through the mail. From there, it is pressed into pills to mimic OxyContin and other opiates.

Making fentanyl illegal is not the solution. Drug abuse is a medical problem, not a criminal one. All opiates should be legalized and safe doses prescribed. Education, as in tobacco and alcohol abuse, is the only solution.