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Adam Zivo: Harm-reduction advocates gaslighting Canadians about 'safe supply'

For years, they pretended as though diversion wasn't a problem. Now, some are claiming they had been warning about it all along

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If gaslighting were an Olympic sport, harm-reduction activists would be buried in gold medals.

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For many years, they claimed that there are no real downsides to “safer supply” — an experimental initiative that gives addicts free recreational drugs to dissuade use of riskier street substances. When media reports emerged that these drugs were regularly being diverted to the black market, harm reductionists stridently dismissed them as right-wing disinformation.

Adam Zivo: Harm-reduction advocates gaslighting Canadians about 'safe supply' Back to video

Now that evidence of widespread safer-supply diversion is indisputable and government support for the experiment is collapsing, these activists are claiming that they had, in fact, always warned the public about this problem, and that the solution is, astoundingly, more safer supply.

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To understand their revisionist narrative, it’s important to understand why these drugs are diverted in the first place.

Safer-supply providers primarily distribute hydromorphone, a pharmaceutical opioid as potent as heroin. Yet many opioid addicts use fentanyl, which is roughly 50 times stronger than heroin, so even enormous hydromorphone doses fail to get them high. This leads them to sell or trade their hydromorphone to secure illicit fentanyl — an easily predictable outcome, really.

“Proponents of a safe-supply policy were quite vocal about this problem from the very beginning, and warned that it would result in users selling off the drugs they received in order to get the drugs they were actually addicted to,” wrote progressive writer Alex Passey in a recent op-ed in the Winnipeg Free Press that called for expanding safer supply.

His words echoed a CBC documentary aired last fall, wherein Canada’s leading safer-supply advocates insisted that they had, from the outset, raised alarms about diversion but were not listened to.

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This narrative is utterly false. Diversion was barely acknowledged in early safer-supply research, and was consistently either downplayed by harm-reduction activists or portrayed in a positive light.

When Health Canada published a preliminary report on its safer supply pilot programs in 2022, diversion was mentioned only once, as an “additional challenge,” which suggested that it was a minor problem. Concurrent harm-reduction studies either ignored diversion, or simply interviewed safer-supply patients and credulously argued, based on their testimony, that it is a rare phenomenon that amounts to “compassionate sharing” and “mutual aid.”

In 2022, for example, the National Safer Supply Community of Practice (now known as the Substance Use Health Network), published a document called “Reframing Diversion for Health Care Providers”). Outrageously, it advised doctors to “appreciate the benefits of diverting prescribed medications,” and to avoid portraying the illegal practice as harmful or reckless.

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In early 2023, a Vancouver-based recovery centre warned that teenagers were accessing diverted hydromorphone, only to be dismissed by harm-reduction activists. British Columbia’s then-chief coroner, Lisa Lapointe, a radical safer-supply advocate, went so far as to claim that safer-supply diversion to youth is an urban myth.

When the National Post published an 11,000-word investigative story of mine later that year, wherein 14 addiction-medicine specialists testified that safer supply hydromorphone was being widely diverted, the activist pushback only intensified.

Lapointe told media outlets that critics of safer supply were “reprehensible” and that reports of diversion were unscientific and based on “rumour.” Meanwhile, one of the main doctors behind Canada’s safer-supply movement told the London Free Press that reports of diversion amounted to “unfounded anecdotes” and “silly boogeyman” tales.

Jesse Brown, founder of the Canadaland podcast network, wrote a series of posts on X claiming that my journalism had “dubious sourcing” and that safer-supply diversion is a non-issue. The thread was viewed by over 500,000 people and widely shared.

For over a year afterwards, harm-reduction activists harassed me on social media, sometimes with violent and disturbing language, calling me a “grifter” and a fabulist. Their crusade was so vicious and persistent that professional contacts privately expressed sympathy to me for withstanding this abuse.

All of this was because I reported, accurately, that safer-supply drugs were being widely diverted onto the black market.

Eventually, evidence of the scandal became incontrovertible — and not just because of my follow-up reporting.

In December 2023, B.C.’s top doctor, Bonnie Henry, released a report acknowledging that safer-supply diversion is a common occurrence. The following year, a government-commissioned report, written by drug policy expert Jonathan Caulkins, confirmed that B.C. police were observing safer-supply patients openly selling their hydromorphone to organized gangs “everyday.”

In early 2025, a leaked presentation from B.C.’s Ministry of Health showed that provincial officials were aware that safer supply diversion was a major problem. In the aftermath, the province mandated witnessed consumption of safer-supply drugs to cut down on diversion, and the federal government stopped funding its pilot programs.

Needless to say, all of this was highly discrediting to the harm-reduction movement, and to safer-supply advocates in particular. Many Canadians might reasonably wonder if they were deliberately misled, given that, by these activists’ own admission, this diversion crisis was predictable and obvious.

Rather than honestly addressing this breach of public trust, however, harm-reduction activists are now claiming, in an Orwellian twist, that they had always tried to expose a scandal that they had, in fact, done their best to minimize. The gaslighting never stops with these people. It is exhausting.

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