Diversion of prescription medication is nothing new. When I walked the beat in the Downtown Eastside 25 years ago, there was always somebody standing at Main and Hastings offering T3s, for example, so the issue of diversion is not new.
I think the devil's in the details when we're talking about diversion, because there's certainly diversion of prescription medication, which is different from, but inclusive of, the diversion of the safe supply medicine chain.
Then of course there is what is a much more pressing issue to me as a police leader: the matter of counterfeit pills that are produced, and can be produced, in very large quantities. The problem with that is they look exactly like prescription pills, so the possibility of someone dying as a result of taking what they think is a diverted prescription is actually quite high, because we don't know what's actually contained in those counterfeit pills. From an organized crime perspective, that can be really scaled up. Unlike diverted prescriptions or diverted safe supply, which is very limited and more of a street level phenomenon, the issue of counterfeit prescription medication is capable of really scaling up, and that's a huge issue. Certainly, that's one thing.
When it comes to what is the most deadly part of our drug supply, it's fentanyl, absolutely, since 85% of overdose deaths are attributable to fentanyl. Then come cocaine and then methadone.
What we don't see, at least not in Vancouver.... I can't speak for the whole province on this, despite the fact that I am here in my capacity as president of the British Columbia Association of Chiefs of Police. I don't know the nuances in all communities across the province, but in Vancouver that's where our focus is, because that's what people are dying from according to the coroner's data. They're not dying from diverted safe supply and they're not actually dying from diverted prescription medication; they're dying from fentanyl, coke and meth, and that's where we really focus our enforcement efforts.