Vancouver police fentanyl seizures more than doubled in 2018

published on July 2, 2019 by Zak Vescera in Vancouver Sun

Vancouver police seizures of fentanyl have spiked as the powerful opioid continues to appear in startling amounts of street-level drugs.

Cops confiscated over 18,000 grams of fentanyl and its variants in 2018 over the course of 1,182 seizures. That’s up from 8,624 g seized over the course of 399 seizures the year before, according to data obtained by Postmedia News via a Freedom of Information request.

Dr. M-J Milloy, a research scientist at the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, says this reflects the “radical change” in Downtown Vancouver’s illicit drug market since 2014.

A study published by the centre checked 1,006 samples of street-level opioids at safe-injection sites and found 88 per cent of them contained fentanyl. Almost two-fifths of all checked substances didn’t contain what the client expected…

View the full article