New 'track and trace' program uses advanced testing and AI to locate origin of toxic drugs in B.C.

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Chemistry professor Jason Hein with robotic drug-testing equipment in his lab at UBC. Photo by Herman Thind /Government of B.C.

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Independent MLA Elenore Sturko of Surrey-Cloverdale, a former RCMP officer, said it has taken 10 years for the province to begin rolling out something that should have been an obvious priority from the beginning.

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She said that police have long lacked the ability to trace where drugs are coming from, which became a problem when drugs started being diverted from the province’s safer supply program.

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“When we had, what the government itself classified as significant diversion of safe supply, they really didn’t have any way of tracking what was going on, and they did not work with police in a way that allowed them to have really good surveillance of the programs that they had in place,” said Sturko.

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Conservative public safety critic Macklin McCall, also a former RCMP officer, pointed to a recent drug bust in Chilliwack and said that it seems like every few months police are dismantling another production facility.

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Independent MLA Elenore Sturko of Surrey-Cloverdale, a former RCMP officer, said it has taken 10 years for the province to begin rolling out something that should have been an obvious priority from the beginning. Photo by Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press/File

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He said the new program won’t help police officers target organized crime effectively and what is needed are more officers.

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“You can provide all the tools for police to do their job, but if there are no police to use those tools, then those tools become useless,” said McCall, who said there needs to be co-ordination between all levels of government to combat the drug trade.

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“We know that international drug trafficking is happening right from British Columbia to places like Australia, New Zealand. I think that there needs to be a co-ordinated effort with respect to that, because once you go outside of British Columbia, it becomes another jurisdiction.”

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Drug advocate Garth Mullins said that the program is positive in the sense that it provides more data but criticized it over its partnership with police.

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He said drug checking has been around for years but needs more funding. He also said that at the end of the day, what the province needs to do is scale up its prescribed alternatives program to give people an alternative to illicit street drugs.

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“This data will only be generated after police have seized the drugs, and so this is something that seems to be assisting police in interdiction. Every time you have a strategy of police trying to get dope off the street, you’re basically creating more risk of more contamination,” said Mullins.

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“For the last almost century, the more police chase drugs, the more drug dealers and the supply chain has to innovate and find novel components to substitute.”

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Former chief coroner Lisa Lapointe agreed, saying that if the toxic drug crisis were simply an issue of giving police more money and resources, it would have been solved already.

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She said she’d like to see the province to develop a long-term plan to work with health professionals on getting people off the street supply.

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“This is a health issue. Everybody agrees it’s a health issue, and yet, continually, the health professionals who have evidence of what is effective to address the harms that their patients experience and people with drugs experience, are left out of the conversation,” said Lapointe.

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