The investigation began with the alleged kidnapping last November of a bank customer in Campbell River, B.C., who claimed he was being forced to transfer his car and thousands of dollars to drug traffickers.
It ended with a raid on a fortress-like property within the boundaries of a tiny First Nation 10 kilometres away and, according to police, the seizure of thousands of pills originally provided to users of the province’s safe supply program.
Four people now face charges of drug trafficking in association with the bust — with one count specifically accusing them of dealing hydromorphone, the substance handed out as safe supply.
The story of the investigation and its consequences — including banishment for three of the accused from the We Wai Kai First Nation — is told in documents CBC News applied to unseal in provincial court.
It’s a case the We Wai Kai chief says raises questions about the flow of government-funded drugs into the illicit market; a story that illuminates the bigger toxic drug crisis and its mix of greed, death and desperation.
“It’s never ‘safe’ when it’s in the hands of drug dealers,” says Chief Ronnie Chickite, leader of the We Wai Kai’s roughly 1,100 members.
“It just shows you that it’s not a safe supply. I think the program had intentions, but it’s obviously failed. … I know the government officials see it different, but this is how we’re seeing it as a nation of our size. And seeing the amount that was there, I mean it’s unfortunate, but it’s not the system we need.”
We Wai Kai First Nation Chief Ronnie Chickite says safe supply drug program has “obviously failed.”
‘It’s a good money-maker’
The search warrant and the criminal charges that flowed from it were all issued in the downtown Campbell River courthouse, which sits about 50 metres away from the pharmacy where a handful of people line up every weekday morning to get their safe supply pills.
According to documents obtained by CBC in a similar case, patients can be issued up to 28 hydromorphone tablets at a time. On the street, the tiny pills are worth as much as $20 each and can be swapped for cash or harder drugs.
CBC spent two days in Campbell River speaking to police, First Nations members and safe supply users.
William Cook is here every day. He says he’d never trade the safe supply that protects him from death; he thinks it’s wrong to sell personal medication.
But he understands both the temptation and the pressure.
“Sometimes it’s chaotic. There’s people outside and they’re bugging you and they’re asking you and there are people trying — like more than multiples — trying to get it. It’s a good money-maker,” he says.
“For some people it’s probably an income and they’d starve [without it]. I think it’s wrong, of course, because it’s against the law, [but] some people need it to eat. That is a fact.”
CBC News applied to unseal the Campbell River search warrant to look at the facts behind the controversy surrounding claims that safe supply drugs are winding up in the hands of criminals.
British Columbia became the first province to offer prescribed alternatives to street drugs in March 2020. As of this April, 4,387 people were dispensed safe supply, according to figures provided by B.C.’s Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions.
Advocates have long acknowledged the possibility some safe supply users might exchange their prescription drugs for stronger street drugs — a process known as diversion.
But the extent of the problem is unknown.
At one point, Prince George RCMP called it an “alarming trend” — a claim the force’s assistant commissioner countered almost immediately by saying there was “no evidence to support a widespread diversion.”
B.C. Premier David Eby says he has asked health authorities to look at introducing some kind of chemical marker into the supply of prescribed alternatives in order to trace them back to their origin.
“Yes, there’s a risk of diversion, just like any medication,” Eby said in the legislature in response to a question about the issue in May.
“We need to, as government, through the health authorities, through the prescribers, stay on top of that and address those issues as they come up. And that’s what we will continue to do.”
‘He had been kidnapped’
Campbell River RCMP entered the fray in February by announcing the seizure of 3,500 pills of Dilaudid — a brand name for hydromorphone — during a bust on the We Wai Kai First Nation.
The target of the raid was a home on Nursery Drive — a bucolic road about two minutes drive from a controlled gate Chief Chickite said was purpose built to keep first COVID, then drug dealers out of the reserve.
Four of the home’s residents — Chris Lewis, Leah Lewis, Shyanne Davis and Serena Hadley — have since been charged with drug trafficking.
None of the accused have entered a plea at this point and none of the allegations against them have been tested in court.
According to the search warrant, the arrests followed surveillance of a husband and wife suspected of drug trafficking, who were flagged to police by staff at the TD bank.
A customer “told the bank staff he had been kidnapped and was being forced to transfer money to a bank account,” the warrant says.
“Bank staff called the Campbell River RCMP, who responded.”
The detachment’s street crime unit began watching the suspects, noting “meetings with known drug users and street-level drug traffickers” as they drove between the Nursery Road house and locations around Campbell River, including hotels, parking lots and residences.
Police obtained the search warrant on Feb. 20. The raid happened the next day, with the safe supply pills allegedly turning up alongside two kilograms of fentanyl and a kilo each of cocaine and methamphetamine.
Campbell River RCMP Insp. Jeff Preston says police regularly test drugs to determine whether they’re counterfeit or diverted from safe supply or another type of prescription.
“Typically when a person does get prescribed safe supply, they go to the pharmacy, they will get their pill bottle with the allotted number of prescribed pills,” Preston says.
“And there is a way for us to tell from that bottle if it’s safe supply.”
‘Taxpayers are getting ripped off’
Collen Middleton keeps a drawer full of those bottles in the small room where he hangs his guitars in his house in Nanaimo, about 150 kilometres south of Campbell River. He has collected them as evidence of what he sees as a failure of the safe supply system that he has observed first hand.
An environmental scientist and punk musician, Middleton admits he knew little about the toxic drug crisis before moving to Vancouver Island from Calgary with his wife and children a few years ago. Then someone died in his yard.
He says he started finding labels and pill bottles on the ground between his house and the safe supply pharmacy a few blocks away — which is how his collection started.
Middleton says he has watched people swap safe supply pills for money or drugs before casting aside the empty containers. They tear the labels off some. There are names on others. Middleton wonders how many of those people are now dead.
Middleton and his neighbours started the Nanaimo Area Public Safety Association in an effort to have their voices heard. He says he has been attacked as a right-wing conspiracy theorist — a charge he calls “ridiculous.”
He doesn’t know what to do with his collection of bottles, which no one seems to want.
Like the We Wai Kai chief, Middleton says he feels like he’s pointing out facts government doesn’t really want to hear.
“I think taxpayers are getting ripped off,” he says.
“If the drugs aren’t being used for their intended purpose and they’re being sold into the black market for profit, then the people who are selling their supply are not getting the health benefits of the system, and organized criminals and gangs are profiting.”
‘The system’s broken’
All four accused in the case made brief first appearances in the Campbell River courthouse on June 10 — two by phone and two in person.
In addition to the count accusing them of trafficking in hydromorphone, they are also charged with multiple counts of trafficking in other substances, including fentanyl, methamphetamine, cocaine and GHB.
Leah Lewis had little to say as she and her co-accused left court and walked across the street to her car.
“The system’s broken,” she told CBC News before driving off. She wouldn’t explain what she meant.
According to Chickite, the raid and the allegations of drug dealing have had consequences beyond the courthouse for Leah Lewis, Serena Hadley and Shyanne Davis.
All three women — who are not members of the We Wai Kai First Nation — have been banished from the reserve.
“It’s a grave threat. … They are not permitted on any land the nation owns,” Chickite says.
He said Chris Lewis is a member of the First Nation.
In part because of the raid and the sheer amount of drugs seized, Chickite says the We Wai Kai have also amended their laws to give the band the option of revoking citizenship for members considered to be a “grave threat” to the citizenry.
Chickite says the We Wai Kai have been successful in steering youth away from the toxic drugs that killed 47 people in the Greater Campbell River health area in 2023 — the region’s deadliest year since a public health emergency was declared in 2016.
According to the search warrant, one of those deaths occurred in a motorhome in the front yard of the Nursery Road property last October: “Leah Lewis advised that her husband Chris Lewis found the woman deceased.”
‘I’d rather live than die’
Outside the Campbell River pharmacy, Shauna Adams holds out her hand to display the 10 Dilaudid pills she gets through safe supply every day. She takes them two at a time, every few hours, to stave off withdrawal.
The 30-year-old says her problems began with a bad relationship and “spiralled from there.”
She says she has seen too many friends die from overdoses.
“I didn’t want to be one of them because I have two kids,” she says. “So I want to be in their lives and watch them grow up.”
Adams says her boys only know that she needs to “go and get medicine every day.”
She puts her hands over her ears as she talks about the pressure to sell and the dealers who circle safe supply users every day asking if they want to trade or sell their pills.
“I kind of just don’t listen to it ’cause I don’t wanna be a part of it,” she says.
“I’d rather live than die. That clearly makes sense. I don’t want to cheat the system. I like my doctor. I don’t want to lie to her.”
Shauna Adams says many people depend on the safe supply program, and it bothers her to see it being abused at the expense of those who need it.
At the end of the day, Adams says the ability to get off drugs comes down to a combination of willpower, support and motivation. She’s come to know a lot of the people who depend on the safe supply program as friends.
It upsets her to see anyone taking advantage of them.
“It bothers me that they care more about making money than other people’s safety,” she says. “That’s what really bothers me.”
They’re prescription pills meant to help deal with the opioid crisis, but police say an alarming number of safer-supply drugs are ending up for sale illegally on the streets. CBC’s Jason Proctor follows the trail of a B.C. drug bust and uncovers how so-called diversion happens and why some say the system is broken.