A pillar of organized crime, fentanyl has wreaked havoc across the nation and sparked a trade war with the U.S. And the bad trip could get worse
Nestled between two mountains in British Columbia’s southern interior, the tiny town of Falkland used to be known mainly for its mammoth Canadian flag, perched on a hill 500 feet above the community.
On a chilly day in October 2024, a team of RCMP officers clad in hazardous-material suits descended on a compound in the forest they would later describe as the biggest fentanyl “super lab” ever discovered in Canada.
The lab was clearly being run by some serious people, whose sophisticated equipment likely required university-level training to use. Officers also seized a batallion’s worth of weaponry, including numerous pistols, 21 AR-15-type assault rifles, even submachine-guns.
It was the biggest but by no means only example of a striking trend in Canada’s illicit narcotics trade. In a country that has long been an importer of hard drugs from cocaine to heroin, criminals are manufacturing today’s most prominent street drug at home — on a massive scale.
Not only that, their operations are the focus of a burgeoning trade war with the United States. President Donald Trump has threatened to impose crippling tariffs on Canada partly because, he claims, we are “flooding” his country with the dangerous opioid.
Canada has responded to the tariff threat by promising to do more to combat the problem. Kevin Brosseau, the newly appointed fentanyl “czar,” headed to Washington this past week with Public Safety Minister David McGuinty and representatives of the RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency to discuss their latest efforts, including listing seven major criminal organizations as terrorist entities.
Trump’s beef seems more than a little overstated — Canadian fentanyl comprises less than one per cent of the drugs seized by U.S. border guards, the rest coming from Mexico. Police here say the much-cheaper Mexican product makes the U.S. a negligible market for Canadian-made fentanyl.
The amount of firearms and the weaponry and ammunition. It was like for a small army.
B.C. RCMP Cpl. Arash Seyed
But busts like the one in Falkland and others in B.C. and Ontario raise a perplexing question: How did a once-obscure prescription pain drug come to wreak such havoc across the nation and beyond the borders, and become a money-spinning, made-in-Canada pillar of organized crime?
The answer lies in an era of liberal prescribing of morphine-related drugs, a watershed drop in that prescribing that opened the door to black-market fentanyl, and suspicions about China’s role as chief exporter of the finished drug and its chemical ingredients.
“When I started my career, heroin was the opioid of choice — the king of opioids,” said Hamilton Police Det. Matt Dugdale in Ontario. “But I’ve seen a complete shift, to the point where I don’t even see heroin anymore … It’s all fentanyl, all the time.”
Fentanyl’s man-made origins
The drug’s origins wouldn’t seem to predict its current status as the deadliest narcotic this continent has ever seen.
Its molecular structure allowed it to cross the blood-brain barrier more easily than morphine-based drugs, for quicker and more potent action. Gram for gram, it’s considered up to 100 times more powerful than morphine. Like natural opioids, it is a central nervous system depressant and taken in excess can cause breathing to slow to a stop, depriving the heart of oxygen and causing it to stop beating — often for good.
Fentanyl eventually was sold as a pain treatment, too. Perhaps most importantly for what was to come, it was wholly man-made — poppies and their opium were not needed.
But it was other drugs that laid the groundwork for its lethal rise decades later.
At one time, doctors in Canada and the United States shied away from prescribing opioids as pain relief for anyone but terminal cancer patients, knowing well the long history of opium addiction. That reticence began to evaporate in the late 1990s, in large part due to the makers of a new, slow-release opioid called OxyContin. Purdue Pharma funded symposiums, ads in journals, lunches for doctors at pricey restaurants and even a medical school textbook in a campaign to change the opioid mindset. Those efforts worked, convincing physicians that the company’s drug could be taken by patients with non-cancer chronic pain — or just hurting from injuries or surgery — with little worry about abuse.
Canada became second only to the United States in the consumption of opioid prescription drugs. Both countries legally dispensed far more of the medicines per capita than any other country in the world.
There were also hints of what was to come down the road from one particular opioid. In 2005, a little-noticed Health Canada alert revealed that two teenagers in different parts of the country were prescribed a pain patch — one child for a sore throat, the other for chronic headaches — that contained an unusually powerful opioid.
They passed out as fentanyl seeped through their skin and into their “opioid-naïve” bloodstreams. The 15-year-old girl and 14-year-old boy never woke up.
“The amount of morphine-like drug that comes out of that little patch is enough to bring down a horse,” the heartbroken father of one of the victims told the National Post at the time. “So what chance does a 98-lb girl who’s dehydrated have against something like that?”
Later that year, the government revealed that three or four other teenagers had died after using their parents’ pain patches to get high. Coroners also noticed an increasing number of deaths tied to the synthetic drug. A 2008 study found that half of 25 street drug users surveyed in Toronto had injected fentanyl in the previous three months — after extracting it from legal pain patches.
For the time being, fentanyl was still a relatively rare opioid of abuse; OxyContin and other naturally derived drugs were the main culprit. By the late 2000s, addiction to opioids was rampant, causing hundreds of overdose deaths a year. Those who became hooked used opioids prescribed to them by doctors, pills that were diverted onto the streets or both.
A population primed for disaster
“Without the prescription opioid crisis and the excessive, long-term prescribing, without creating this demand in the population and all these problematic users … we wouldn’t have the fentanyl death crisis we’ve had over the last 10 years,” says Benedikt Fischer, a senior researcher at Simon Fraser University and one of the country’s leading experts on the opioid epidemic.
But how exactly did one lead to the other? For starters, the pendulum swung again.
As a new decade began, a consensus grew that opioid prescribing was far too liberal, prompting action from governments and medical regulators. Authorities set up opioid monitoring programs, provincial drug plans stopped covering OxyContin and its new generic versions, and doctors were educated on more appropriate opioid prescribing.
The results were dramatic.
The change was a belated success in terms of medicine’s handling of opioids but created a “supply shock” for Canadians hooked on the drugs, Fischer said.
“We’re probably talking about hundreds of thousands of people who had been habituated into strong opioid use,” he said. “And all of a sudden they were left without supply.”
History shows that when one drug disappears from the streets, it’s replaced by another, said Dr. Alexander Caudarella, a longtime addiction-treatment specialist, now chief executive of the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse and Addiction.
But as the flow of prescription opioids slowed, Canada failed to offer abusers treatment and other supports, he said.
“We didn’t ramp up the other side,” said Caudarella.
Into the void slipped fentanyl. This time, it wasn’t a smattering of addicts using ingenious methods to extract the drug from prescription patches. It started streaming into the country from producers in China, sometimes via Mexican cartels, sometimes simply in the mail after being ordered online.
Its potency offered a key advantage for traffickers and smugglers. Small quantities pack a massive punch — experts say a person unaccustomed to opioids can die after taking just two milligrams. So, unlike cocaine or heroin, lucrative shipments could be easily hidden. The RAND Drug Policy Research Centre estimated that the annual underground supply of fentanyl to the U.S. weighs less than 10 tons.
“That literally means that any one of the over five million trucks that cross the U.S.-Mexico border each year could hold all the illegal fentanyl our nation consumes,” Stanford professor Keith Humphreys told a California State Assembly committee in 2023.
To make matters worse, there was a “subversive element” to how illegal fentanyl was seeded into the Canadian population, said Caudarella. He recalled former patients telling him that when they were dealers, they initially had trouble selling fentanyl because of its reputation for dangerous strength.
But as the fentanyl tsunami began a decade ago, the opioid was often mixed with other drugs or sold on the street in the form of what looked like oxycodone pills.
“People didn’t know they were being switched over to fentanyl,” said Caudarella. But “once people became addicted to fentanyl, there was no turning back … Their brain really is hijacked, their reward pathways are hijacked.”
China as supplier
The question still remains: Why fentanyl, and why was China the chief supplier? The country has certainly been a hub of chemical and pharmaceutical production for years. Caudarella suspects there were also “geopolitical considerations.”
“You have to look at the globe and ask why is it that fentanyl really came only to North America in as substantial a way as it did.”
He declined to comment on whether the Chinese government deliberately piped a highly addictive and hazardous drug into this continent — or at least turned a blind eye when Chinese entrepreneurs did so. Others have been less circumspect.
A U.S. congressional committee issued a report last spring indicating that Beijing provided tax rebates to companies exporting fentanyl copycat drugs and precursor chemicals, so long as they were not selling the stuff in China.
Dennis Molinaro, a former national security analyst with the federal government who specializes in foreign interference, said he has no direct knowledge of Beijing’s role, but wouldn’t put it past China to use fentanyl as a weapon of sorts.
“When it gets out into the public, you have a situation where you have a tremendous amount of resources to police it, stop its spread, try to deal with the health crisis,” said the academic associate at Ontario Tech University. “That plays into any adversary’s hands.”
“The overdoses go up, the deaths go up and we don’t know what to do,” said Fischer, the Simon Fraser researcher.
Under pressure from the United States and Canada, China finally took some action and in 2019 listed fentanyl as a “scheduled” drug, meaning manufacturers needed special permission to make and export it.
That change brought another “paradigm shift,” said Staff Sgt. James Cooke of the RCMP’s federal policing program. It didn’t mean there would be any less fentanyl. On the contrary.
Exporting finished fentanyl may have been effectively banned in China, but chemical companies could still sell the precursors used to synthesize the drug.
A deadly new Canadian industry
It was November 2021 and a 911 call sent emergency services rushing to a spacious home in an upscale suburb of Hamilton. Inside, they found a young man dead from exposure to highly toxic chemicals. It turns out the house contained a large lab for making fentanyl. The victim appeared to have been the chemist.
Movement of equipment helped police piece together the web and, in August 2023, the hammer came down. Officers raided a super lab operating in farmland west of Hamilton, another that had been disbanded, and storage lockers filled with precursors and masses of poisonous chemical waste.
By that time, police across the country were tracking down and raiding such “clan (clandestine) labs.” As factories run by drug cartels in Mexico fed the U.S. market, Canadian criminals began making their own fentanyl, first in houses like the one in Hamilton, later in compounds concealed in the woods or other rural landscapes.
Many had already been producing other synthetic drugs — methamphetamine and ecstasy — and their labs continued to turn out those as well as the deadly opioid.
According to a recent report by the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, 235 organized crime groups here are involved in making or distributing fentanyl.
The RCMP has Clandestine Laboratory Enforcement and Response (CLEAR) units across the country — specially trained teams for dismantling the illicit facilities — while police academies in B.C. and Ontario provide technical instruction on the dangerous work.
“It’s kind of a cat-and-mouse game,” said Cpl. Arash Seyed, a spokesman for the Mounties’ federal policing program in B.C. “We don’t know, we really don’t know, how many (labs) may be out there.”
But we do know the “new paradigm” came with sobering health statistics: the number of opioid deaths doubled annually after China cut back on exports of finished fentanyl.
That invention 65 years ago turned into a gift for Canadian criminals. Getting heroin onto the streets involved a complex, global supply chain from poppy farms in Afghanistan to processing facilities elsewhere and risky smuggling routes into this country. Cocaine has a similar journey from field to street.
But fentanyl, known to chemists as N-(1-phenethyl-4-piperidyl) propionanilide, is entirely synthetic and relatively easy to make. The most popular method among crime groups today was developed by Indian chemist Pradeep Kumar Gupta in 2005 to ease production of what’s still a useful anesthetic and pain drug for cancer patients. The method was summarized by him as “three successive one-pot reactions at room temperature,” cost effective, high-yielding and doable without special skills.
In very rough terms, precursor chemicals are mixed for several hours, the solution cooled, moisture extracted, and the resulting substance dried and ground into a powder. Instructions like the Gupta method are “a Google search away,” noted Dugdale.
“I don’t need to know much about the reaction between flour, milk and eggs … but I can make a cake.”
As easily fabricated Canadian fentanyl reached the streets during the pandemic, the price in Hamilton plummeted by 60 per cent, said Dugdale.
In the Ontario city, the drug is sold in 10 milligram doses for about $10 each. But fentanyl makes up just one to five per cent of the product after it has been diluted with cutting agents such as caffeine powder, said Dugdale.
The lab he and colleagues shut down in Smithville, Ont., was able to produce 63 kilograms of fentanyl in a single chemical “cook.” If each street dose contains no more than half a milligram, the output from a process that takes just a few days would be at least two million doses.
“These labs can make such a large amount of fentanyl … it far exceeds Canadian demand,” Dugdale said.
Where is it all going?
Dugdale said he’s seen no evidence of Canadian fentanyl being moved south of the border. The economics don’t seem to make sense. Fentanyl pills that sell in the U.S. — whose main source is Mexico — for under a dollar can go for 10 to 20 times that in Canada.
Still, he said it’s conceivable Canadian crime groups are selling surplus fentanyl at bargain prices in the U.S.
Canada actually imports Mexican-made fentanyl, too, some of it arriving via the U.S. The Canada Border Services Agency said it seized 4.6 kilograms of the drug in the last year.
The labs present other dangers beyond just fabricating a lethal street drug and roiling cross-border relations. For each kilogram of fentanyl they cook, five kilograms of toxic waste is left behind and typically disposed of in crude, unsafe ways, said Dugdale. The Hamilton-led Project Odeon discovered 3.5 tons of waste in a regular storage locker. Even the gases such material emit can be fatal if inhaled.
Few companies in Canada can process the waste safely, meaning the RCMP in B.C. had to sit on several thousand litres of fentanyl-production byproduct, said Staff Sgt. Derek Westwick, head of the Pacific-Canada CLEAR team. Some of the precursor chemicals, like propionyl chloride and dichloromethane, are so corrosive members of his unit need to wear up to three layers of personal-protective equipment to avoid injury, he said.
“Back in the day … the chemicals were bad,” said Westwick. “But these chemicals now that are used for fentanyl production are beyond toxic.”
Yet through it all, police continue to face obstacles.
Organized crime investigations typically unfold over long periods of time as police use wiretaps, financial tracking and other methods to try and capture the highest-ranking offenders. But police pounce immediately when they discover a super lab to avoid its products getting to market, said Seyed, meaning the kingpins can escape immediate prosecution, with initial arrests focusing on cooks and other low-level criminals.
Just one individual was charged at the time of the Falkland raid.
“We’re between a rock and a hard place,” said Dugdale in Hamilton. “If you don’t identify and prosecute those (top-level) individuals, there’s almost nothing to stop them from doing it again.”
As police combat the labs on the ground, the government is trying to curb the import of precursor chemicals that fuel the industry. Health Canada has added 128 fentanyl precursors to schedules under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, said the department’s Jennifer Pelley.
Many of those chemicals have legitimate uses, from petrochemical processing to making fragrances and cosmetics. If they’re scheduled, legal businesses must be certified to import the compounds.
“We’ve been very proactive and, I would say, world-leading,” Pelley said.
Criminal fentanyl entrepreneurs dodge and weave with each government move, importing chemicals one step back and not yet scheduled so they can make the precursors themselves. They’re also turning to fentanyl analogs — drugs with a slightly altered chemical makeup but the same biological effects.
Pelley said the government has tried to keep up with the changes by passing “class-based” regulations that automatically cover all compounds related to those actually named. When a new chemical surfaces, it can then be added to the schedule without passing new regulations through cabinet.
Some shipments, however, are simply disguised to get across borders.
Westwick said he has team members who encourage chemical suppliers in Canada to report suspicious purchases of material that could be used in making fentanyl. Tips from those companies have led to busts of super labs, he said.
Behind it all, in a sense, is China, which has itself scheduled only a few of those precursor chemicals. Molinaro, author of a forthcoming book on Chinese interference in Canada, questioned why the Liberal government doesn’t do more to hold Beijing to account.
“We’re not talking about China’s responsibility,” he said. “If there is a China nexus, why can’t we say that? Why can’t we call that out if it’s there?”
Canada’s focus on safer use
Addiction researcher Fischer maintains that attacking the supply side with police enforcement, government regulation or diplomacy will achieve little. As one lab is shut down, others pop up in a dark game of whack-a-mole, he argues.
Instead, the focus should be on the demand side — convincing users to shift away from the dangerous opioid, using treatment, but also more controversial programs such as safer-supply, where users are handed less-potent opioids such as hydromorphone to keep them away from fentanyl.
Much of the Liberal government’s drug strategy in the last decade has focused on harm reduction — trying to make abuse of narcotics such as fentanyl as safe as possible, employing supervised injection sites, safer supply and the like. But publicly funded treatment for addicts remains hard to come by, and the expansion of harm reduction has actually coincided with great harms — a deluge of opioid deaths.
Caudarella of the Centre on Substance Abuse rejects the either-or, supply-demand debate. A combination of the two is needed. But there has to be more accountability to ensure, for instance, that treatment providers are succeeding, and that police raids truly curb the volume of fentanyl reaching the streets.
Canadians want users to get help, but also want a “sense of law and order” in their communities, he said. “We need to focus on real results … are communities safer, are communities healthier?”
A formidable foe
Regardless of the tactics used, it’s a battle with clearly high stakes. And the Falkland super lab case, Canada’s most important to date, suggests the foe is formidable.
The site where the facility was found once served as an illegal cannabis grow-op but was upgraded at seemingly great expense to make synthetic drugs.
“People were very well aware of trucks coming and going and all the construction that was taking place,” said Seyed. “It was in plain view.”
Dean Trumbley, the CoIumbia Shuswap Region director responsible for the community, which has its own RCMP detachment, said it was “quite a shock to have something of that scale happening in our backyard.”
But, he said by email, “criminal organizations specialize in (hiding their operations) because if they didn’t, they would all be caught instantly. We are a rural area with lots of remote properties.”
Inside the lab, police were surprised to find not just the usual flasks, vacuum pumps and “rotary evaporators,” but a gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer — sophisticated devices used to analyze chemical compounds that Seyed said would require an advanced degree in chemistry to operate.
Then there was the arsenal: a collection of guns, explosive devices, silencers and body armour unprecedented for a synthetic drug lab, and reminiscent of the Canadians’ heavily armed counterparts in Mexico.
“The amount of firearms and the weaponry and ammunition,” said Seyed. “It was like for a small army.”