A nineteen-year-old does not have to live on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside or in a major American city to encounter a lethal illicit drug supply. Fentanyl has reached small towns, farms and communities that once imagined this was somebody else’s problem.
An epidemic that removes people from the workforce, consumes health-care and policing resources, burdens courts and corrections, damages neighbourhoods and kills citizens in their most productive years is not simply a drug-policy failure. It is an economic-security problem as well as a public-health and national-security threat.
During the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, British commercial interests, backed ultimately by military power, exploited China’s enormous market for opium. Addiction weakened communities, drained wealth and contributed to political instability. The wars and the unequal treaties that followed became embedded in Chinese historical memory as part of what Beijing still calls its “century of humiliation.”
Publicly available evidence does not conclusively establish that Beijing deliberately engineered this outcome.
Congressional investigations have found, however, that the Chinese government offered tax rebates to manufacturers of fentanyl precursors on the condition that the products be sold abroad.
If companies operating from China knowingly sell precursor chemicals to criminal organizations, disguise shipments, falsify invoices, employ deceptive packaging or facilitate laundering while understanding the destination of those chemicals, North American governments are entitled to treat those activities as something far more serious than ordinary commerce diverted by criminals.
Where investigators can establish that a trafficker supplied the fentanyl that caused a particular death—and especially where the accused knew the substance contained fentanyl, understood its extreme toxicity, misrepresented its contents, continued selling following previous overdoses, or otherwise demonstrated reckless disregard for customers’ lives—criminal negligence causing death should be seriously considered alongside conventional trafficking charges.
Investigations should move simultaneously upstream and downstream: from the street dealer to the wholesaler, from the wholesaler to the transnational criminal organization, from the laboratory to precursor brokers, chemical manufacturers, freight forwarders, cryptocurrency networks and professional money launderers.
A kilogram intercepted at the border removes one shipment. A financial investigation capable of identifying the organizations financing dozens of shipments can dismantle infrastructure.
Where foreign companies knowingly supply precursor chemicals to criminal organizations, Canada should use every instrument available: criminal indictments where jurisdiction permits, sanctions, asset freezes, immigration restrictions, corporate designations, international arrest warrants and coordinated action with allies.
https://www.todayville.com/the-new-...ina-and-the-case-for-criminal-accountability/
Former senior RCMP addresses multiple issues in a lengthy article. Doesn't question veracity of case law results of uniquely Canadian Stinchcombe Law where suspects have to be informed of an investigation and if charged have to be informed of the results and evidence pretrial flustering allied investigators. At whatever risk of double standards non-Canadians shouldn't enjoy the outcomes of non-legislated law and adhere strictly to parliamentary decisions.
