Fentanyl super labs in Canada pose new threat for U.S. opioid epidemic
• by David Ovalle, Nick Miroff The Washington Post December 24, 2023
https://www.wvnews.com/news/wvnews/fentanyl-super-labs-in-canada-pose-new-threat-for-u-s-opioid-epidemic/article_8b94f3ae-a282-11ee-b8ab-d3ef020ba45e.html
At a rural property an hour outside Vancouver in October, Canadian police found 2.5 million doses of fentanyl and 528 gallons of chemicals in a shipping container and a storage unit. Six months earlier, they raided a home in a cookie-cutter Vancouver subdivision packed with barrels of fentanyl-making chemicals, glassware and lab equipment.
Thousands of miles away outside Toronto, police in August found what is believed to be the largest fentanyl lab so far in Canada – hidden at a property 30 miles from the U.S. border crossing at Niagara Falls, N.Y.
U.S. authorities say they have little indication that Canadian-made fentanyl is being smuggled south in significant quantities. But at a time when record numbers of people are dying from overdoses in the United States, the spread of clandestine fentanyl labs in Canada has the potential to undermine U.S. enforcement efforts and worsen the opioid epidemic in both nations.
Investigators in Canada say the labs are producing fentanyl for domestic users and for export to Australia, New Zealand and, they assume, the United States.
“It’d be hard to believe it’s not occurring,” said Philip Heard, commander of the organized crime unit for police in Vancouver, a city hard-hit by fentanyl overdose deaths. “Most police leaders I’ve spoken to believe our production outstrips what our domestic demand is.”
The Canadian labs are a curveball for U.S. authorities whose efforts to combat fentanyl are focused on the southern border with Mexico. U.S. Customs and Border Protection has installed about $800 million worth of powerful scanning and detection equipment at land border crossings since 2019. Nearly all that technology has been deployed along the U.S. southern border, where CBP confiscated nearly 27,000 pounds of fentanyl during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the most ever.
Republican lawmakers in recent months have called for U.S. military strikes in Mexico targeting fentanyl traffickers and drug labs. The spread of fentanyl production to Canada suggests traffickers there are poised to benefit if Mexican suppliers get squeezed. The lightly-patrolled U.S.-Canada border spans more than 5,500 miles – the longest international boundary between two nations in the world – and has few physical barriers.
One candidate seeking the GOP presidential nomination, Vivek Ramaswamy, has proposed building a wall along the U.S. northern border, citing the threat of fentanyl smuggling from Canada. But the appearance of the Canadian labs has generated little reaction in Washington, where the U.S.-Mexico border remains the focus of the fentanyl debate.
The powerful, intensely addictive drug and other synthetic opioids claim more than 70,000 lives a year in the United States. A similar proportion of Canadians are dying of overdoses – about 7,000 annually. The two countries remain the only nations where fentanyl poses such a lethal threat.
CBP seized just two pounds of fentanyl along the northern border during the 2023 fiscal year, the agency’s latest statistics show.
“We are not seeing any sort of southbound flow of fentanyl into the United States from Canada,” said Robert Hammer, the top Homeland Security Investigations agent in Seattle, who said he consulted with his fellow agents in Buffalo and Detroit.
“That’s not to say it’s not happening, and not to say it may not happen in the future,” Hammer cautioned.
Hammer said he remains skeptical Canadian-made fentanyl will displace the pills flooding into the United States from Mexico. “We are down to 45 cents a pill on the wholesale side here in Seattle,” he said. “You have to be pretty damn competitive to beat 45 cents a pill to compete with the Mexican cartels that have entrenched themselves with the distribution network they have set up here in the Pacific Northwest.”
Still, authorities in the United States and Canada are investigating the robust trade links between the countries, routes that provide ample opportunities for smuggling. In October, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against a Vancouver company that purports to sell beverage industry supplies, alleging it was a distributor of illicit precursor chemicals and equipment and sought to obtain from China nearly 3,000 liters of chemicals used to make fentanyl, heroin and meth. The company’s owner has denied the allegations.
Drug experts have long warned that a crackdown along the U.S.-Mexico border could prompt criminal groups to seek alternative sources or begin producing fentanyl in the United States. Most of the labs encountered in the United States are what police agencies refer to as “pill press” operations, where traffickers make tablets out of fentanyl powder smuggled from Mexico.
The super labs that police are finding in Canada differ because they are synthesizing the drug – not merely pressing pills – using precursor chemicals sourced primarily from China.
Chemical companies and brokers in China supply the raw ingredients for the Canadian labs. Canadian authorities say criminal organizations behind the fentanyl labs include biker gangs and groups with links to Asia, but there are few obvious ties to Mexican cartels.
Daniel Anson, director of intelligence and investigations at the Canada Border Services Agency, estimated that 98 percent of the country’s fentanyl-making materials are seized in Western Canada and originate in China. He said fewer seizures at maritime ports suggest smugglers may be increasingly using mail and courier services to get precursor chemicals into Canada; the packages are generally mislabeled to hide the true contents.
“Canada is struggling with the precursor chemicals,” Anson said in an interview. He, too, believes Canada has become a fentanyl-exporting nation.
“It’s pretty easy to move small amounts of precursors and still produce large amounts of fentanyl,” he said.
Drug markets in Canada and the United States have long been intertwined, dating to the late 1800s and early 1900s when opium factories in the Vancouver area provided supply to the south. Marijuana grown in British Columbia indoor labs proliferated in the Pacific Northwest. Biker gangs such as the Hells Angels were big producers of crystal meth smuggled into the United States.
“Canada has long punched above its weight when it comes to illegal drug manufacturing,” said Stephen Schneider, a professor of criminology at Saint Mary’s University and author of “Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada.”
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