It’s tough to get the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) to talk much about their work, let alone on the record in a lengthy interview. You might say that the agency is more comfortable asking us questions than answering them. I needed to hear from them directly about whether, and how, illicit fentanyl was entering Canada, and what was being done about it.
To my surprise, I got a quick response to my letter asking to speak with someone at the CBSA about the opioid crisis. Yvette-Monique Gray, director of the Enforcement and Intelligence Division for the Pacific Region, offered to meet me at her office. It turns out that Gray has been a longtime voice for greater openness within the CBSA. Internal emails released under the Access to Information Act in 2010 include her reaction to a reporter’s complaint that the agency took three weeks to respond to basic questions about the arrival of a boat of Tamil migrants off the BC coast. She wrote to a colleague, “I know that you’d be preaching to the converted, but it’s a vindication of sorts to actually hear a member of the media echo what we think every day. We need to help [the media] by providing the right commentary to them at the right time.” It seemed I’d found the right person.
The CBSA office in Vancouver is located in a new glass and metal condominium-style building near the site of the 2010 Olympic Village. It’s an area that used to be rundown, but like much of the city, it has since been gentrified. Now this trendy urban oasis has craft breweries, artisanal ice cream, and access to the seawall boardwalk—far from what you might expect for a government bureau. It’s also a stone’s throw away from the Downtown Eastside, the part of the city that’s been notoriously ravaged by the overdose crisis.
Gray has had an impressive CBSA career, and she often speaks for the agency after major drug trafficking busts. I hadn’t been waiting long in the empty CBSA meeting room when Gray entered with David Lothian, chief of the Intelligence Section, who reports to her. After thanking them for agreeing to meet with me, we got down to business.
“For this particular part of the world, because we’re so close to Asia Pacific, we put special emphasis on synthetic opioids, on precursors, and definitely on anything that would be coming from Asia Pacific,” Gray began.
“We have a large marine port. We have international airports. We have air cargo and we also have an international mail centre as well as a busy land border. But in terms of trade with Asia Pacific, it’s significant, particularly the marine port because it’s the largest in Canada—and our mail centre also has the most volume from Asia Pacific and from China, which is, of course, where a lot of the opioids come from.”
Now I had a basic confirmation of the China connection. But I needed a lot more details. How were illicit opioids entering Canada? What was being done about it? And why can’t we just stop illicit fentanyl from entering the country—wouldn’t that solve the problem?
“On the mail centre side, we have the biggest mail centre in terms of volume from Asia Pacific and that’s where the majority of the fentanyl is that we’re seeing, by a long shot,” said Gray. “Then also through the air cargo operation, again because of flights from Asia. We have seen quite a bit in the air cargo stream, but for the most part, most of our seizures have been at the mail centre and in the mail stream.”
All foreign letters or small packages sent to Canada are routed through one of three international mail centres: Vancouver, Toronto, or Montreal. Most of the international mail going through Vancouver comes from Asia, and it can be subject to the search and seizure of any illegal substances. I knew that Gray couldn’t reveal exactly how the CBSA goes about figuring out which letters and packages might contain illicit fentanyl, but I wanted to get a sense of how big a challenge the border agency was facing.
“What’s the volume of mail coming through?” I asked.
“On average, the Vancouver International Mail Centre clears about 1.9 million pieces of mail per month from China,” said Gray. “That would be everything from letter mail all the way to packages. So generally, the letter mail, it’s a flat piece of paper. Obviously you could still put a small amount of fentanyl in there—it would still be worth quite a bit of money and would still be very dangerous—but usually we’re seeing it in bigger packages. We’re seeing it concealed inside something else. But if you can imagine being able to examine all those individual pieces of letter mail as well as all the larger packages when you’re seeing millions in a given month—it would just be impossible.”
In that moment, it hit me. There was absolutely no way for us to simply stop illicit fentanyl from entering Canada from China. How could we possibly screen even a fraction of the tens of millions of letters and packages entering Canada every year at this one location? Trying to find illicit fentanyl in that many items would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And any one of them—even a single letter—could contain enough fentanyl to be worth thousands of dollars and to kill hundreds of people.
“We do have the obligation to facilitate the free flow of legitimate trade and to make sure that goods continue to move,” added Lothian. Indeed, massive quantities of legitimate “Made in China” goods are imported into North America, making it easier for fentanyl to enter undetected. “Obviously we couldn’t shut down the mail centre entirely just to strictly look for fentanyl. There’s such a major economic and financial implication to doing something like that.”
Remarkably, it wasn’t until May 18, 2017—several years into the opioid crisis—that the CBSA finally got the legal authority under the Customs Act to open incoming international mail weighing 30 grams (the weight of a typical greeting card) or less. Before that, they couldn’t even touch most letter mail. Still, with CBSA’s mail seizures typically measuring between 10 and 200 grams of pure fentanyl, traffickers can reduce the risk of detection by spreading it in small quantities across dozens or hundreds of packages (although frequent packages to the same address could get flagged).
Risk management is also the way the CBSA prioritizes its work. Identifying which letters and packages to check is an exercise in focusing your resources on what analysts estimate to be the greatest probability of the worst harm.
“We do have X-rays,” said Gray, seemingly trying to restore some confidence in the screening process that, from where I sat, would never be adequate to the challenge she’d described. “If something is concealed inside something else, you can see it through an X-ray. Is it heroin? Is it fentanyl? Is it cocaine? You don’t know what it is, but you know there’s something that doesn’t belong there. So all of the high-risk mail is actually examined either by X-ray or it’s examined manually by opening it. But the other part that’s been different for us, and it was a game changer, is the health and safety issues associated with handling fentanyl.”
Not only is it impossible for border agents to check all envelopes and packages for illicit substances, but opening one that’s suspected of containing fentanyl is a complicated process. The CBSA got some advice from the RCMP’s CLEAR team about how to do it. “Our officers need to open packages with extra caution, including using things like fume hoods, to ensure there is no contamination,” said Gray. “If it’s steroids and you open it and white powder goes in the air, you’re not as concerned. If it’s fentanyl, you’re concerned.” While I could imagine the need for caution in opening these packages, in other contexts, several of my sources noted that claims of people overdosing just from touching fentanyl are the stuff of urban legend that simply increase the stigma against people who use drugs.
Even if a suspicious substance is uncovered, there’s no way of knowing what it actually is until it’s been tested. Those tests used to be done by the CBSA’s central drug lab in Ottawa, but the opioid crisis changed all that. The process was just too slow. “We have had a satellite lab actually set up where they were able to test substances immediately,” said Gray. “So it gave the officers a greater level of comfort with examining it, and the feedback on what is and isn’t fentanyl is a lot fast
er because the lab was right there.”
With the massive volume of letters and courier packages coming through the Vancouver International Mail Centre, it’s amazing that any pieces containing the deadly substance are found at all. When I asked Gray about how successful the agency has been at interdicting illicit fentanyl, she promised to get back to me with concrete statistics. Just a few weeks after we met, she emailed me the numbers.
In 2017, the CBSA made 47 illicit fentanyl seizures (weighing a total of 7.5 kilograms) from letters and packages at the Vancouver International Mail Centre. An additional six packages were seized that were being sent via courier companies with illicit fentanyl weighing a total of 2.2 kilograms. So, in all, less than 10 kilograms of illicit fentanyl was seized from 53 items in 2017—about one seizure per week on average. This illicit fentanyl, in pure form, was prevented from hitting the streets. But if we’re honest, we know that it’s just a drop in the bucket. That’s 53 items identified from around 22.8 million in one year: 0.0002% of total packages. We’re never going to be able to solve this problem at the border.
* * *
——
What about at the source? If we can’t stop illicit fentanyl from entering Canada at our borders, what about getting China to crack down on this deadly export at its end? After all, it’s being produced within their territory; they should be responsible for the harm it’s causing.
A big part of the challenge is that, unlike many other illicit narcotics, fentanyl has legitimate medical purposes. There are thousands of legal pharmaceutical labs in China, and it’s not clear to what extent illicit fentanyl products coming from China to North America are being diverted from these legal labs, illegal labs, or both. “In trying to determine where illicit drugs are being made, and given the fact that there is a legitimate market for fentanyl, we try to determine if it could possibly be diverted from a legitimate factory for illicit purposes,” said Gray. Abbotsford, BC Deputy Chief Mike Serr echoed Gray’s concern: “Many of them are producing it actually legally, but then also have a subset of their company that is also shipping this out illicitly as well.”
Another key player in responding to the opioid crisis on Canada’s West Coast is Clayton Pecknold. He served as co-chair of BC’s overdose task force that was set up to deal with the opioid crisis, and is an assistant deputy minister and director of police services for BC. “There was a period of time where we were advocating for an agreement with China to interdict fentanyl from China,” he told me. “We, the province of BC, had raised that with the federal government. It was not in place, notwithstanding that the federal drug agency in the United States, the DEA, had already entered into one with China. It’s not that the RCMP don’t know how to do their job. They know how to do their job. Unfortunately, they were underfunded federally for so long and they were so focused on counter-terrorism that they haven’t had the capacity to do the type of early warning intelligence gathering that they should be doing on the drug file.”
On November 24, 2016, the RCMP and the Chinese Ministry of Public Safety announced that they would coordinate enforcement against illicit fentanyl trafficking. China also agreed to make precursors (substances that can be used to make fentanyl) controlled under Chinese law. This has meant that some limited progress has been made. “Hong Kong Customs does do outbound checks, and has intercepted fentanyl previously,” Gray told me. “When they intercept something like fentanyl, they will often alert us to the fact that they’ve made a seizure on export. Those outbound seizures have provided us with valuable intelligence information, and have assisted us with our efforts to identify drug smuggling groups within Canada.”
Yet, while the level of cooperation from Chinese authorities at their end of the transnational drug trafficking chain isn’t insignificant, there’s a heavy dose of pessimism to counter whatever optimism exists for China’s ability to shut off the export of illicit fentanyl. And part of that lies in the drug’s chemical makeup.
* * *
——
Fentanyl (C22H28N2O) is actually fairly straightforward, comprising four basic elements: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. By making a few changes to its chemical structure, an “analogue” can be created. Think of an analogue as a copy, but with very minor changes. It’s alike enough to provide similar or enhanced effects, but just different enough that at the molecular level it’s technically another substance.
The most infamous fentanyl analogue is carfentanyl (C24H30N2O3), although there are in fact dozens of them, many of which have no medical use. Some have been rediscovered by illicit drug manufacturers from research carried out since the 1960s, while others are new “designer drugs” created by chemists working for the benefit of organized crime. Why all the variations on fentanyl? To keep one step ahead of the law.
Drug regulation in many countries, including China, is based on “scheduling” specific substances—identifying them by their chemical composition. These scheduled drugs are then subject to strict controls, meaning they can be legally manufactured only in certain facilities and sold only for certain purposes. And as more fentanyl analogues get scheduled, chemists working at the behest of organized crime have that much more incentive to come up with new ones. “Once an announcement is made about regulating new substances or analogues,” Lothian told me, “then it’s usually within a month or two months that we start to see new analogues that we hadn’t seen previously that do try to bypass some of those regulations.”
For years, when new fentanyl analogues were detected in Canada and the United States, authorities here would complain to China, which would then add them to their list of scheduled substances, meaning they fall under legal regulation. Then, within a month or two, a new fentanyl analogue would be discovered on the streets here; it would get reported and then added to the schedule in China, and on it went. Given the massive profits involved and the ingenuity of these chemists of death, this deadly game continued. It was not until May 1, 2019 that China finally adopted a class-wide control of all fentanyl-like substances.
Rapidly evolving analogues can also make it tougher to detect and identify new substances as a form of fentanyl. “The way detection technology works around this, sometimes you tweak two things and all of a sudden your detection technology that was working really well doesn’t indicate to the same level,” said Gray. “So that analytical piece is really critical to staying ahead of all of these compounds.”
Despite reportedly seizing 1.8 tonnes of illicit drugs between 2015 and 2017, China shut down only eight production labs—and this in a country with an estimated population of 1.4 billion. Still, China is the first to admit that it can’t get ahead of the illicit drug manufacturers exporting their deadly products to the world. “My feeling is that it’s just like a race and I will never catch up with the criminals,” said Yu Haibin, a division director at the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Narcotics Control Bureau. The likelihood of China being able to stop the outflow of illicit fentanyl analogues seems remote.
But what if China does become really good at cracking down on illicit fentanyl manufacturing and transnational trafficking? Criminal opportunists are undoubtedly waiting in the wings to pick up any slack. There are already indications that other global players in the drug trade, particularly Mexico, are involved in making illicit fentanyl. According to the U.S. DEA, “Both Mexico and China are major source countries for fentanyl and fentanyl-related compounds” (although drug seizures in the United States have found that fentanyl from China is generally higher in purity than that from Mexico). Still, as Lothian told me, “We have heard of intelligence reports about Mexico producing fentanyl, but we actually haven’t seen a lot of fentanyl come through our land borders or come through that network.” In central and eastern Canada, the CBSA has also found fentanyl entering Canada by mail from various European countries in the form of pills and fentanyl patches.
In short, if China manages to turn off the tap, th
ere are dozens of countries with lax regulations, corrupt officials, and organized criminals that would jump at the opportunity to take over its role as the world’s main illicit fentanyl supplier. It’s the globe’s deadliest game of whack-a-mole waiting to be played: every time one supplier gets hit, another one pops up to take its place.
* * *
——
So far, we’ve seen that most illicit fentanyl entering Canada is coming from China, hidden among the millions of items every month entering Vancouver by post. The dark web and cryptocurrencies are being used to conceal the identities of purchaser and seller, skirting anti–money laundering and banking rules that have been developed over decades to combat transnational drug trafficking. But what about the relatively small number of letters and packages entering the country that, despite the astronomical odds, are intercepted by border agents? If they’ve got a package made out to a Canadian address and containing pure illicit fentanyl, surely they could nab the person who ordered it in Canada, right? That’s what I wanted to know from Gray and Lothian at the CBSA.
“You’ve opened a package. You’ve inspected it. You’ve got white powder. It then tests positive for fentanyl. What happens next?” I asked.
“Once we have confirmation that it is a controlled substance, we will continue working with whatever information is available,” said Lothian. “We look into the importer name and address, the exporter name and address, and look for any linkages or commonalities to previous seizures. A lot of that data is, at times, fictitious, because you can write whatever you want onto a package. So it’s definitely challenging to make some linkages to who is ultimately behind some of these shipments.” But the CBSA doesn’t operate alone. “We’ll work with our police partners and we’ll refer the file to them,” Lothian continued. “Collectively we’ll work out an investigative approach to try and see if we can determine who is responsible for that importation and proceed that way.”
Overdose Page 7
