By Matthew Hannick

Nigel Stuckey saved more lives during the last five years of his policing career than the previous three decades combined.

"Every time you go back to the street, it has a different flavour," said Stuckey, a former sergeant with the London Police Service (LPS) who retired in 2022.

“As a frontline police officer, you are constantly going to overdoses in the city. I've administered Narcan to multiple people, and this is just something that never existed before.”

Stuckey first noticed a dramatic increase in overdoses and drug-related crimes occurring throughout his city – London, Ontario – in 2019. While the reasons behind this increase were initially unclear, recent data released by the LPS suggest that “safer supply” programs may be contributing to the problem.

[Editor’s note: This story is co-published with Break the Needle.]

Safer supply programs aim to save lives by providing drug users with pharmaceutical-grade alternatives to the untested street supply. That typically means distributing hydromorphone, a heroin-strength opioid, as an alternative to illicit fentanyl.

However, addiction experts say the program is having the opposite effect, as many people who are enrolled in safer supply programs are illegally selling or trading their prescribed hydromorphone on the black market, a practice known as "diversion."

Harm reduction advocates claim that safer supply diversion is not a significant issue, but according to an investigation into London Police Services (LPS) seizure data by journalist Adam Zivo, the number of hydromorphone tablets seized in London increased by 3,000 per cent after access to safer supply was greatly expanded in 2020.

In 2019, the LPS seized fewer than 1,000 hydromorphone tablets. This number jumped significantly in 2020 and continued to rise afterwards, reaching 30,000 tablet seizures last year – an unprecedented amount. The London police estimate that last year’s record will be met or exceeded by the end of 2024.

Doctors have said that this is only representative of a small fraction of what is actually out there, and that just three to four of these pills, if snorted, are enough to induce an overdose in a new user.

Some people are wondering why this data wasn’t released months, if not years, earlier.

Dr. Sharon Koivu, a London-based addiction physician, was among the first to recognize the harms of safer supply and has been warning the public about widespread diversion for years.

Based on her clinical experiences, she believes that diverted safer supply hydromorphone is causing new addictions and falling into the hands of youth.

When Koivu tried to speak out against safer supply and call attention to diversion and an overall lack of program transparency, she was bullied and told that the suffering she was witnessing didn’t exist.

This harassment was so severe that her mental health deteriorated and she worried about whether her career had been irreversibly damaged – yet the London police had quietly possessed data showing that she was right all along.

“It's become an ideological thing,” she said. “People seem to have doubled down on the information they have. They don't want to hear from someone who has information and concerns that don't align with their, I'm going to say, ideology – because it's not science.” 

News of skyrocketing hydromorphone seizures might have remained hidden from the public had it not been for a major bust earlier this year.

On April 12, the London police announced a drug seizure which included 9,298 hydromorphone eight-milligram tablets. When Zivo inquired into this seizure, he received no answers to his questions for almost two months. He says that he was “stonewalled” and that the police seemed unwilling to release key data until it became impossible for them not to.

Zivo found it particularly concerning that the 2019-2023 hydromorphone seizure data was not released earlier.

“Journalists and addiction physicians have been trying to raise the alarm about this issue for years,” he said, “but have been called liars, grifters and fearmongers, despite the fact that data validating their concerns existed and was held by the London Police Service.”

Stuckey, who now works as a documentary filmmaker covering London’s homelessness, addiction and mental health crisis, had a similar experience when he queried the LPS about the 9,290 hydromorphone pills seized this April.

Despite multiple requests for information about a possible connection to safer supply, the police service did not get back to him. He expressed frustration at the police’s unresponsiveness and worried that a lack of government transparency is endangering both the general public and law enforcement officers.

“Members of the London Police Service are being put in harm's way dealing with organized crime and firearms to take drugs off the street, which were provided by the federal government. It's absolute lunacy that we are paying one branch of government to rid a problem that was created by another branch of government,” said Stuckey.

It would be deeply concerning if the LPS knowingly withheld data pertaining to safer supply diversion. Not only has the failure to publish such data hindered informed public debate and policy development, it has also compromised the safety of the very communities which police are tasked with protecting.

According to Zivo, safer supply programs have benefitted from the silence of powerful institutions like the LPS.

He said that, as there seems to be significant institutional resistance to acknowledging the community harms of safer supply, then more attention and trust should be given to local grassroots-level addiction medicine practitioners "who are bravely testifying to what they are seeing in their clinics."

However, Dr. Koivu thinks that “the tide is turning” and that more people are beginning to understand the harms of safer supply.

“I think it’s unfortunate that this data wasn’t made available sooner, when it was relevant to the funding of these programs and the changes we’re seeing in the city. The police need to be accountable for that. I really don’t understand their rationale for not addressing this” she said.

“They hung me out to dry while knowing that what I was saying was accurate. If the police are afraid to come forward, no wonder physicians are afraid to come forward, too.”