Stopping drug sales: aim for the top

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/06/2025 (363 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When a retail business loses customers, they immediately figure out how to recruit new ones.

This is particularly important if these customers are big spenders.

Well, 570 customers of the illicit drug industry died in Winnipeg last year. I can assure you that a skilled, well-organized, retail drug system recruited more than the 570 dead users, your neighbours, with new customers for their deadly drugs.

We need to seize a significant amount of that dirty money and sentence some of the nice white middle-class professionals who manage that money laundering to significant jail sentences.

The illicit drug industry is extremely profitable. It includes hundreds of small frontline dealers. I knew many of them.

Next are the medium-sized dealers like Sandra Guiboche, who finally got 10 years in jail. The big-time dealers are raking in millions a year in profits.

One alleged dealer is charged with laundering $6 million through Manitoba’s casinos. Residents of Red Sucker Lake paid this alleged dealer half a million dollars. All the systems worked for him.

He allegedly put his drugs on the plane and the local dealer paid him through e-transfers.

I’ll take some responsibility for the province now requiring casinos to report potential money-laundering cases to the Winnipeg Police Service and the RCMP.

I strongly support harm reduction, including safe consumption sites, providing drug testing information and faster access to treatment.

However, I’m interested in what strategies we could use to disrupt the profitable sale of dangerous drugs to inhibit the recruitment of new users.

I strongly believe the criminal justice system needs to focus on the sale of fatal doses.

I am recommending that dealers who sell fatal doses to users be charged with manslaughter and face up to 15 years in jail.

Presently, frontline dealers that I know think nothing of a three-month sentence — but if they were facing 15 years they would demand cleaner, safer drugs from their suppliers.

The police need the power to seize small quantities of drugs for sale without charging the dealer. Small dealers get their drugs on credit.

After they’ve sold them, they pay their supplier and get credit for another batch. If police were able to rapidly seize small-time dealer stashes, it would cause a severe crisis in the marketing system for illicit drugs when dealers couldn’t pay for their supply.

Recently it took us seven months to close down a drug dealer, two doors from a school, with 70 to 100 customers a day. It was a huge money maker.

Communities need to get five-day eviction orders for drug dealers again.

Hopefully the new government’s recent legislative amendments will bring that power back. Police need to bring the community support unit back to full strength.

These officers know where the dealers are. These tactics are called disrupting the drug industry. These actions are a partial but essential solution to the devastation of deaths caused by the illicit drug industry.

Finally, it is crucial that we follow the money. A significant amount of dirty money is laundered in Manitoba every year. That money is skilfully re-introduced into the economy. We need to seize a significant amount of that dirty money and sentence some of the nice white middle-class professionals who manage that money laundering to significant jail sentences.

While drug dealing and money laundering will continue to be profitable, if we implement tough consequences at the high end of the drug sales system, we can reduce the deaths and addictions of our neighbours.

The silent effective marketing system of illicit drugs, which supports the death of 570 people and the addiction of thousands, must be disrupted.

If we do not act decisively and powerfully, many more people will die and even more will become addicted. Pressure needs to be put on our decision makers in the city, the province and the police to implement an active disruption of illicit drug dealing and a massive seizure of the profits.

Sel Burrows is a member of the Order of Manitoba, co-ordinator of the Point Powerline, and a member of the Tri-Government Task Force on Illicit Drugs.