On the ground in Kensington, where addicts are being ravaged by an animal-grade sedative
Philadelphia — “Angie” didn’t think she’d ever get into drugs. Then tragedy struck and she lost control. Over the span of seven minutes inside a homeless shelter in late January, this twentysomething woman tells me the story of how her life turned upside down here in this godforsaken neighborhood of Kensington, the heart of Philadelphia’s open-air drug market.
“One dad I met with early on,” says B.C. MLA Elenore Sturko, “talked to me about his young teen daughter. She died of a fentanyl overdose, and when they cleaned out her room afterwards, they found a bunch of diverted safe supplies, still in the capsule bottles with other people’s prescriptions, the name of the prescribing doctor, the name of the pharmacy.”
Turf wars between rival trafficking gangs claimed 110 lives last year, and French families are despairing at the spiral of violence consuming their young
The murder of 15-year-old Azad Budak was filmed by a passer-by and posted on Telegram, an encrypted social media platform. Almost immediately, the video of him lying on the ground with a bullet in his chest spread through Besançon, the eastern French city where he lived. His two brothers, aged 11 and 16 at the time, saw the images, as did his neighbours, who phoned his parents to say what had happened.
“I couldn’t walk, talk or think,” said Sema Budak, his mother. “He was a baby to me.”
A leaked document produced by British Columbia’s Ministry of Health alleges that “significant” quantities of “safer supply” opioids are being diverted to the black market with the assistance of organized gangs and certain unscrupulous health-care providers. This raises serious questions about the competence and honesty of B.C. New Democrats and federal Liberals, who gaslit Canadians for two years by insisting that reports of mass diversion were disinformation.
Kensington, Philadelphia, has been called many things over the years. The Walmart of Heroin. The Las Vegas of Drugs. “How do you know the toothbrush was invented in Kensington?” one longtime Philadelphia drug user joked. “Because anywhere else, they would have called it the teethbrush.”
The East Coast’s largest open-air drug market (according to the Drug Enforcement Administration), Kensington has long symbolized the dysfunction of a city that once served as America’s capital. Shots of Kensington’s “zombies” make for local news fodder and X outrage. The city’s failure to fix Kensington was central to the successful mayoral campaign of Cherelle Parker, a tough-on-crime Democrat, sworn in as Philadelphia’s 100th mayor in January 2024.
An affidavit filed by private investigators retained by the province to surveil supervised consumption sites says they observed apparent drug transactions, public intoxication, discarded drug paraphernalia, physical altercations and public drug use in their vicinity.
But harm reduction advocates and the people who run the sites say they paint a misleading picture.
“All they have here is more evidence of people trying desperately to survive a drug poisoning crisis,” said Sarah Ovens, an organizer with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society.
U.S. President Donald Trump seems to delight in chaos and disruption. Is the threatened tariff war over border security? Drug smuggling? NATO spending? A precursor to trade negotiations? All, or none, of the above?
Yet, as with virtually every crisis, there is also opportunity. In this case, an opportunity for Canada to examine some of these issues and see if we can do better. Not to please Trump, but to ensure that the government is doing what it should to protect its citizens and the country.
“There are very deep concerns that Canada is being used by China in a very sophisticated economic and truly criminal way,” says Samuel Cooper, an investigative journalist and bestselling author of Willful Blindness. In this exclusive interview with Daniela Cambone, Cooper reveals the truth behind why President Donald Trump targets Canada in his recent tariff rhetoric. He explains that it’s not a tactic to get Canada to renegotiate the trade deal with the U.S., but rather to curb the massive illegal fentanyl trade originating from Canada. “China ships the precursors to the West Coast of Mexico and the West Coast of Canada… so Vancouver is used as a hub for these precursors,” he says. He also details how elite Chinese politicians involve Canada in illegal money laundering, while Canadian politicians turn a blind eye to it. Watch this interview for this bombshell revelation!
h/t XC
A week after Doug Ford’s Ontario government passed legislation in early December ordering all supervised injection sites within 200 metres of schools and daycares to close, harm reduction activists did the expected and announced they were taking the province to court.
One of the sites being ordered to close in Toronto, the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site, held a press conference and introduced the lawyers who will argue on its behalf that the closure of these sites violates the charter rights of drug users.
Seven months after the Supreme Court struck down a deal that would have resolved thousands of opioid cases against Purdue Pharma, the company’s owners, members of the Sackler family, have increased their cash offer to settle the litigation — but with a novel catch.
Under the framework for a new deal, the Sacklers would not receive immunity from future opioid lawsuits, a condition that they had long insisted upon but that the court ruled was impermissible.
Mass murderers who will never see the inside of a jail cell.
Toronto’s bylaw officers will no longer crack down on cannabis stores that are operating illegally.
The head of Toronto’s licensing department, Carleton Grant, made it clear during Wednesday’s budget committee meeting that due to the lack of funding and dangers of dealing with criminal activity surrounding these storefronts, bylaw officers are “no longer effective” in stifling these shops from running.
In 2018, the city received just shy of $9 million in provincial funding, through the Ontario Cannabis Legalization implementation Fund (OCLIF), to crack down on dispensaries selling products to customers without a licence. In 2024, that funding ran out.
Welcome to Chowtown where criminals rule.
In October 2020, British Columbia police raided three agricultural properties, targeting Health Canada–regulated marijuana grow operations in Richmond—a once blue-collar farming community that, since the 1990s, has rapidly transformed into a hotbed of transnational narcotics trafficking and money laundering linked to China, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Thousands of U.S. and Canadian records reviewed by The Bureau reveal that Delta Police’s “Big Smoke” raids barely scratched the surface of a corporate structure unfurling from a façade of Hells Angels paraphernalia and Health Canada weed licenses. The investigation suggests an unsettling reality: in modern-day Canada, the boundary between legitimate commerce and organized crime is perilously hazy—especially when political and legal elites, alongside a national regulator, appear complicit.
Everything got worse under Trudeau.
In her professional capacity, Khalila Mohammed was a community harm-reduction health worker. But in her personal life, she was an agent of profound harm and an accessory to manslaughter.
One foolish decision on top of another, one not-so-impetuous act of aiding and abetting on top of another. One lie on top of another, spinning a web of deceit.
‘Painkiller’ does an impressive job of telling a dark and gripping story about a tragic chapter of modern American history.
The prescription painkiller OxyContin was released by Purdue Pharma in 1995; the six-part TV series Painkiller, created by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster and directed by Peter Berg, was released by Netflix in 2023. During the intervening 28 years, Purdue’s flagship product brought even greater riches to the company’s already rich president, Richard Sackler; brought relief to a good many patients suffering from severe pain that was otherwise untreatable; and brought tragedy to countless families as legitimate patients became addicts and then death statistics and as perfectly healthy people, many of them very young, began using the drug recreationally and, caught in the grip of its addictive power, ended up in morgues all over America.
I watched this flick. It was good. What amazes me is that while the Sacklers have been publicly shunned not one of them has been jailed.
Police allege the operation operated over the past few years at King St. and East Ave. and was run by Vincent Asanti, who was arrested for two controlled drugs and substance act offences (cocaine) and proceeds over $5,000 while $51,351.90 was seized from his residences and vehicle.
