Canada’s Opioid Crisis

1,584 words

In March 2023, the City of Toronto released a report that outlines its plan to decriminalize the possession of all hard drugs, including fentanyl and crack cocaine, for persons of any age.

In conjunction with federal government officials from Health Canada, Toronto wants to allow people within city limits to enjoy the drug of their choice with no fear of reprisal from the state (unless you are planning to traffic large quantities). These days, when it comes to destructive behaviour like violent crime and drug use, frontline policies tend towards the permissive, whereas ordinary, law-abiding individuals are constrained.

Destructive, death-dealing drug policies are all well and good as long as we provide the appropriate Amerindian land acknowledgement first. Toronto apparentlywants even more people to be hopped up on the most dangerous substances possible on the “traditional territory of. . . the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples . . .”

In the final report, with its unwieldy title “Toronto’s Model of Decriminalizing Drugs for Personal Use,” there is no mention of the opioid crisis per se. There is, however, mention of the drug toxicity crisis. Some racial and ethnic groups are identified in the report, along with their perceived group interests, but as always, white people remain invisible. The opioid crisis in the United States that has claimed so many lives amongst the white working class is ongoing in Canada as well. This report comes on the heels of a similar decriminalization scheme for the province of British Columbia. Unfortunately, such decriminalization schemes do little to alleviate the suffering of those addicted to legal and illegal opioids. The damage has already been done.

In his comprehensive journal article about the opioid crisis in the United States, Kevin MacDonald asserts that

[t]he pharmaceutical industry is corrupt from top to bottom, and this corruption goes far beyond being a specifically Jewish problem. However, the opioid epidemic is in large part a Jewish creation.^[1]

He then argues:

This article describes a very similar scenario — betrayal by a hostile elite and complicity of many of our own people in targeting a vulnerable population which they hold in contempt. The thesis is very similar to the framework of my book The Culture of Critique, except that, rather than positions at prestigious universities, contracts with top-notch publishers, and media influence, the rewards mainly involve financial benefits to the Sackler family resulting in the deaths of around 250,000 mainly White people — and still increasing year over year.^[2]

I would like to argue that this very same argument holds true in Canada as well: like the United States, Canada is governed by a hostile elite that despises the white majority they purport to govern.

The opioid crisis in Canada is a tragically destructive replication of events that have occurred in the United States. Although some of the cities, names, and numbers may be different, the pattern remains the same: criminally over-prescribed legal opioids cause addiction, which serves as a gateway that leads patients to turn to increasingly dangerous illicit drugs such as heroin, fentanyl, and methamphetamine to maintain their habit. As Trey Garrison and Richard McClure have pointed out in their poignant book about the opioid crisis in the United States, Opioids for the Masses, “the wave of prescription drug abuse led to a wave of heroin addiction. What started as legal opiate use has become a crisis of illicit drug abuse.”[3] The big players that constitute a hostile anti-white out-group are involved in Canada as well such as Purdue Pharma, the Sackler family, corrupt government officials, Chinese triad gangs, and other organized crime syndicates. The escalating pattern of opioid abuse is now here as well, and its victims are the same: the white working class — the historic Canadian nation.

The increased use of drugs, both legal and illegal, is an indication that a society is in precipitous freefall. Nelson Rosit, in an article for The Occidental Quarterly, writes that since the 1960s a growing percentage of the white working class has deteriorated socially and economically. Drawing on the work presented in Charles Murray’s monograph Coming Apart, along with F. Roger Devlin’s review and Kevin MacDonald’s examination of the opioid crisis, Rosit remarks that

[t]his decline is characterized by a large increase in nonmarital births, crime, and drug use, and decreasing industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. The weakening of the family structure has been a huge factor because marriage is needed to socialize the next generation.[4]

I would argue that the very same pattern exists in Canada as well.

According to a detailed research report written by Laura Hatt on behalf of the Library of Parliament’s research publications program:

Opioid‑related harms have reached crisis proportions in many countries, including Canada. Almost 23,000 Canadians died due to apparent opioid toxicity between January 2016 and March 2021. Many other people faced life‑threatening medical emergencies or other harms. These harms have been linked to many causes, including opioid‑prescribing practices and the presence of very potent opioids such as fentanyl and fentanyl analogues in the drug supply.

An unpublished Master of Science thesis, completed in 2016, offers further historical data and analysis of Canada’s opioid crisis:

Over the last two decades, the illicit use of opioids, including prescription opioids, has risen significantly across Canada. Canada claims the dubious distinction of having the third highest per capita narcotic consumption rate in the world, second only to the United States and Germany respectively . . . In 2010, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) released a report on the opioid “public health crisis” in Ontario . . . In people aged 25 to 34 in Ontario, one of every eight deaths is opioid related. . . Improved understanding of the experience of health care for people who use illicit opioids in small and rural communities will fill gaps in current nursing knowledge and has the potential to improve access to care for marginalized people.[5]

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.

In June 2022, Purdue Pharma (Canada) reached a $150 million settlement with federal, provincial, and territorial governments in Canada. Although that sum pales in comparison to the USD $67.4 billion (CAN $86.8 billion) damage figure initially filed in US court in 2020, it speaks to the devastating nature of the opioid epidemic and its ensuing fallout. The settlement also opens the door to litigation against other companies who have profited from prescription opioids over several decades.

Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing and distribution schemes, which were on display in the United States despite OxyContin’s dangers, were replicated in Canada. The same article in the Globe and Mail reports that the statements of claim speak to the fraudulent marketing practices of Purdue Pharma and others that downplayed the drug’s addictive nature:

B.C. launched a class-action lawsuit in 2018 on behalf of federal, provincial, and territorial governments in Canada against dozens of players in the opioid industry, alleging years of misinformation and deception by pharmaceutical firms and distributors that knew, or should have known, that the drugs were addictive and contributing to an increase in overdoses. The legal action targeted more than 40 manufacturers and distributors, including Purdue Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart Inc. and the Jean Coutu Group (PJC) Inc.

In a story dated April 12, 2023, police seized a sizable cache of drugs, weapons, cash, and laboratory equipment from a Vancouver-area home. According to an official news release, police seized $7.8 million of fentanyl, methamphetamines, and cocaine after dismantling a drug lab operating in a residential neighborhood. Police launched the raid after tracking a “group of criminals that were manufacturing and trafficking illicit drugs at various locations throughout the region.”

The commanding officer of the Vancouver Police Department’s Organized Crime Section, Phil Heard, said in a statement that “every day in British Columbia, more people die and new people become addicted to illicit drugs that are manufactured and trafficked by organized crime groups that operate in plain sight,” and he went on to add that “while the results of this investigation are impressive, there is much more work that needs to be done to address B.C.’s overdose crisis and the criminals that profit from it.”

Despite the size of the bust, the perpetrators were released pending the results of the investigation, which prompted more calls for bail reform to curb Canada’s lax, revolving-door justice practices. And this is just one recent example of illicit drug trafficking.

The libertarian idea of permissive drug use in society should be rejected because of the devastating effects that opioids have had on white-majority countries. There is a happy medium between what paleoconservative writer Pat Buchanan has described as Mao Zedong’s draconian punitive approach and Milton Friedman’s hyper-individualised, libertarian approach as far as drug and public health policy is concerned.[6] This laissez-faire, permissive decriminalization approach does not work.

In order to protect our genetic, cultural, and economic interests, catastrophic crimes such as the opioid crisis must be prevented. In the future, whites who work for the collective interests of our people must once again secure key positions of power in government and industry.

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Notes

[1] Kevin MacDonald, “Opioids and the Crisis of the White Working Class,” The Occidental Quarterly 18, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 51.

[2] Ibid., 42.

[3] Trey Garrison & Richard McClure, Opioids for the Masses: Big Pharma’s War on Middle America and the White Working Class (Quakertown, Pa.: Antelope Hill Publishing, 2021), 1.

[4] Nelson Rosit, “Coming Apart Revisited: What Is Happening to the White Working Class?”, The Occidental Quarterly 19, no. 2, (Summer 2019): 50.

[5]Kathryn Hardill, “’That Look That Makes You Not Really Want to Be There’: Health Care Experiences of People Who Use Illicit Opioids In Small Urban and Rural Communities — A Critical Social Theory Analysis” (Master’s thesis, York University, 2016), 3.

[6] Patrick J. Buchanan, Suicide of a Superpower (New York: Thomas Dunn Books, 2011), 393-94.