Ontario’s legal cannabis stores are closing — because illegal shops allowed to thrive

When Canada legalized recreational cannabis in 2018, Ontario made a promise — to consumers, to communities, and to small business owners who invested their lives and savings into the new sector. That promise was simple: the government would regulate the market, enforce the law, and replace the illegal cannabis trade with a safe, transparent, and accountable system.


Ever get the feeling the whole of our “political class” is on the take.

Share

Vancouver’s Drug User Liberation Front organizers challenging Canada’s drug laws

The two organizers of an illicit-drug compassion club in Vancouver, convicted this month of trafficking for providing members with heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine, are back in court challenging Canada’s drug laws as unconstitutional for depriving users of safer options.

Jeremy Kalicum and Eris Nyx operated for more than a year as the Drug User Liberation Front, buying illicit drugs from the dark web, testing them at university labs for fentanyl and other impurities, and selling them at cost to their 43 members.

Share

Activists Claim Dealers Can Fix Canada’s Drug Problem

America should learn from its northern neighbor’s misguided experiments with activist-driven drug ideologies.

Some Canadian public-health researchers have argued that the nation’s drug dealers, far from being a public scourge, are central to the cause of “harm reduction,” and that drug criminalization makes it harder for them to provide this much-needed “mutual aid.” Incredibly, these ideas have gained traction among Canada’s policymakers, and some have even been put into practice.

Share

Derek Finkle: Even injection site workers now admit drug dealing was rampant

The province of Ontario did something last month it has never done before — it defunded a supervised injection site because the chaos and disorder it was causing had reached unacceptable levels for the surrounding neighbours.

The injection site is in Parkdale, a neighbourhood on the west side of Toronto. The community’s efforts to get the province to act were detailed in my previous column at the beginning of October. Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones was simply unable to ignore the mountain of photographic evidence featuring prostrate bodies next to piles of used needles as known drug dealers operated nearby.

Share

RCMP Bust Industrial-Scale Superlab Outside Toronto

TORONTO — A months-long RCMP investigation has led to the takedown of a massive synthetic-drug operation resembling the “super labs” often found in British Columbia — but this one was discovered just forty-five minutes north of Toronto. Officers uncovered an industrial-scale facility capable of producing millions of dollars’ worth of fentanyl, methamphetamine, MDMA, and GHB.

Share

Wrong, wrong, wrong! The Economist’s deluded demand to legalise cocaine

THE Economist, magazine of choice for the globalising liberal elite, has this week called for the legalising of cocaine. That’s right. Its leading article asserted: ‘The most effective single way to reduce the death, violence and corruption would be to legalise and regulate the production and consumption of cocaine. This would eliminate the price premium that motivates the world’s most violent criminals. Consumers could be sure of dosage and quality – an incentive to shun dangerous illegal concoctions. Prisons would be emptier and the criminal justice system could focus on deadlier synthetics.’

Share

FRANCIS: The deadly drug experiment BC refuses to end

The illusion finally crumbled. Premier David Eby himself has now stated that he was wrong, admitting that the Liberal-NDP experiment of “safe supply” has resulted in “really unhappy consequences.”

A grotesque understatement for a policy that has cost thousands of lives.

Share

From BC Bud to Ecstasy, Meth, and Fentanyl: How Canada’s Vast Landscape and Permissive Laws Were Progressively Exploited by Chinese and Mexican Cartels

Over the past month, The Bureau has traced a pattern of numerous cases linking Canada—especially Vancouver’s port and airport—to methamphetamine pipelines feeding overseas markets including New Zealand and Australia. Reporting uncovered prosecutions showing methods engineered to exploit not only Canada’s transportation infrastructure but also its international image and brand. In January 2023, three men were convicted in the largest meth seizure ever at New Zealand’s border: 713.8 kilograms disguised as maple syrup bottles shipped from Vancouver.

Share

Derek Finkle: Academics trying to gaslight residents terrorized by safe injection site crime

Residents near an injection site in the west Toronto neighbourhood of Parkdale have been raising concerns for years about illegal drug activity around the perimeter of the site. They were hoping some solutions would be tabled when the executive director of the Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre, Angela Robertson, called a meeting on July 17 to address the community’s escalating concerns, including a disturbing video of a fight in an adjoining park while a member of the site’s controversial security firm looked on.

Share

Fentanyl Pill Raid in Okanagan, Near Falkland Superlab, Linked to Additives Found in U.S.–Mexico Border Seizures

KELOWNA — Six months ago, Canada Border Services officers intercepted a 20-kilogram shipment of caffeine powder mislabelled as white pigment — a break that set in motion an RCMP investigation into fentanyl trafficking in the desert-like hills above Kelowna, overlooking British Columbia’s Okanagan Lake. The lake, a summer playground for luxury speedboats and party crowds, lies just 100 kilometres south of Falkland, the site of Canada’s most notorious narcotics superlab dismantled in 2024.

Share

Canada’s policy of deferring to the “leadership” of drug users has proved predictably disastrous. The United States should take heed.

Vancouver Junkies – How could this not be considered a successful community integration?

Progressive “harm reduction” advocates have insisted for decades that active users should take a central role in crafting drug policy. While this belief is profoundly reckless—akin to letting drunk drivers set traffic laws—it is now entrenched in many left-leaning jurisdictions. The harms and absurdities of the position cannot be understated.

While the harm-reduction movement is best known for championing public-health interventions that supposedly minimize the negative effects of drug use, it also has a “social justice” component. In this context, harm reduction tries to redefine addicts as a persecuted minority and illicit drug use as a human right.

Share

‘Who wouldn’t want pure cocaine?’: Vancouver’s Drug User Liberation Front believes we shouldn’t blame users for the ills of capitalism

On 12 August 2017, I ran from the car that James Alex Fields, a white supremacist, plowed into a crowd of anti-racist organizers in Charlottesville, Virginia. Other people’s blood splattered on me. I lost my friends in the crowd and panicked. I thought I might die.

A month later, I woke up on a work trip in a hotel room alone in Oakland, California, with my hands trembling, and an unshakeable feeling that I was being chased by a pack of wild animals. I was having a mental breakdown.

This feeling did not cease for months. Repairing myself from that breakdown took years. In many ways, it is ongoing.

Share

‘Unprecedented’ Anti-Fentanyl Operation Nabs 22 Chinese Citizens and Three Americans

An international law enforcement operation called Operation Box Cutter has shut down a major criminal enterprise that was supplying precursor drugs that were used in the manufacture of fentanyl.

FBI Director Kash Patel announced that 22 Chinese nationals, four Chinese pharmaceutical companies, and three Americans had been arrested in what Patel referred to as an “unprecedented” operation.

Share

What Portland got wrong about addiction (and Why New York should pay attention)

Hi. I’m Scott, and I’m an alcoholic.

I have lived the truth behind every flawed assumption, policy misfire and well-intentioned myth about addiction. I have walked through the depths of hell with suffering as my only companion. I know what lives there — and I know the way out.


A very good piece offering a genuine personal explanation of addiction.

Share