OTTAWA, Canada — “The whole purpose of the safer supply program was to divert addicts from using harmful street drugs, but that’s not happening,” testified Masha Krupp, an Ottawa-based mother, at the House of Commons Health Committee last week. Exhausted and blunt, she described how her son has, in the past, diverted his “safer supply” drugs to the black market and how she has personally witnessed widespread diversion by other patients outside the clinic her son attends.

Safer supply programs distribute free addictive drugs – typically hydromorphone, a heroin-strength opioid – under the belief that this stabilizes addicts and dissuades them from consuming riskier street substances. Addiction experts and police leaders across Canada, however, say that recipients regularly divert these taxpayer-funded drugs to the black market, fueling new addictions and gang profits.

The Liberals and NDP have denied that widespread safer supply diversion is occurring, despite ample evidence to the contrary – but Krupp’s lived experiences underline the folly of their willful blindness.

“As soon as he was put on safe supply, he started diverting his safe supply,” she testified. “You’ve got drug dealers – I know this for a fact through my son; I’ve seen it – they will come to your home, 24/7; you can call at two in the morning. They take your hydromorphone pills.”

According to Krupp, her son’s addiction issues have not improved despite his enrollment in a safer supply program for over two years. He still uses fentanyl and crack cocaine, which led to yet another overdose just last month, she said, adding that diversion and a lack of recovery-oriented services contribute to his instability.

“The Dilaudid (brand name hydromorphone) is a means of currency for my son to continue using crack cocaine – so it’s not safe because he’s still using unsafe street drugs,” she said in parliament.

Krupp further explained that, on multiple occasions, she witnessed and photographed patients selling their safer supply in front of the clinic where her son has been a patient since June 2021. The transactions were not subtle: she could see them counting and exchanging white pills.

Over time, Krupp corroborated these observations by acquainting herself with some of these patients, who would admit to selling their safer supply: “I got to know all these people that are diverting and using right in front of the clinic, in front of all the tourists, and parents walking by with kids.”

She believes that safer supply could have a role in addiction care if it were better regulated, but feels that the current model, where supervised consumption of these drugs is rarely required, is only “flooding the market, with taxpayer dollars, and with lethal opiates…”

“It’s unsafe supply, in my view, as a mother with lived experience,” said Krupp. “Our Liberal government, right now, is acting like a drug lord.”

Her testimony was consistent with a CBC investigative report published last February, wherein Ottawa’s police officers confirmed that safer supply diversion is rampant. One constable quoted in the story, Paul Stam, said that virtually anytime police would pull up to Rideau and Nelson Street, where the clinic Krupp’s son attends is located, “they would observe people openly trafficking in diverted hydromorphone.” The officer further told the CBC that the “street is flooded with this pharmaceutical-grade hydromorphone” and that there has been a dramatic, province-wide reduction in the drug’s black market price – from $8-9 per 8-mg pill to just $1-2 today.

Although Krupp gave her parliamentary testimony last week, I interviewed her in July and kept her story private at her request – at the time, she worried that going public could interfere with her son’s attempts at recovery.

In the July interview, Krupp explained that not only had her son told her that safer supply diversion is ubiquitous, she had also heard this from two of his acquaintances who were also on the program: “The information that I’ve received is that the drug dealers have operations set up 24/7 across the city, buying legal dillies (the slang term for hydromorphone).”

She explained that she had been able to witness and document safer supply diversion because on most Friday mornings, she would take her son to his clinic appointments and wait for him outside in her car. Often parked just two or three meters away from where many drug deals occurred, she had a line of sight into what was going on: clearly identifiable dillies being handed over for other drugs.

She estimated that by that point, she had cumulatively witnessed at least 25 safer supply patients engage in diversion.

“[Safer supply patients] would trade their dillies for fentanyl and or crack cocaine and smoke or inject it right in front of me. They would just huddle in a corner. It’s all done very openly,” she said. “What I witness, to me, is a human tragedy on the sidewalks of the nation’s capital, with Parliament Hill eight or nine blocks away, and all the politicians sitting there singing praises to safer supply.”

She pushed back on the narrative, popular among Liberal and NDP politicians, that criticism of safer supply is conservative fear-mongering and said that she had voted NDP in the past, and even voted for Trudeau in 2015. Her disgust with safer supply was simply her “speaking from the heart as a mother.”

While harm reduction activists claim that safer supply is a form of compassionate care, Krupp vehemently disagreed: “How is it compassionate to fuel somebody’s addiction? How is it humane to keep a perpetual cycle of drug abuse and dependence?”

Editor’s note: This story is co-published with Adam Zivo’s Break the Needle