While B.C. is grappling with the opioid crisis by pouring resources into community action teams, harm reduction strategies and addiction treatment, Manitoba is augmenting its own clinical approach with an old-fashioned tactic: the courts are throwing the book at opioid peddlers.
Last month, a 55-year-old Winnipeg man was sentenced to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to importing fentanyl from China. In passing his sentence, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Chris Martin said the tough sentence was meant to deter “other people who might be inclined to do what you did … and ultimately roll the dice with some poor addict’s life.”
Last year, Manitoba saw the number of opioid-related overdose deaths climb to 122. While that is roughly the same number of deaths that B.C. records in a single month, judges in the Prairie province had started to impose extremely heavy sentences on dealers, at least by B.C. standards, before the end of the calendar year.
In December, a 37-year-old Winnipeg woman was given a 10-year sentence after police caught her with 150 blotter tabs of carfentanil (said to be 100 times more potent than fentanyl) and 56 grams of fentanyl powder. Even though the woman had no criminal record and sold drugs to support her own addiction, the Crown attorney described the sentence as “at the low end of the range for someone who has the amount of drugs we are seeing here.”
Later that month, a 32-year-old woman described as a “mid-level dealer” was sentenced to six and a half years in prison after she pleaded guilty to possession of fentanyl and methamphetamine for the purposes of trafficking. During sentencing, Judge Carena Roller said the urgency of the crisis called for offenders to be treated by the courts with “determination, hostility and severity,” CBC reported. “I can’t whisper to you about how dangerous this is,” Roller told the dealer. “I have to yell, I have to bang my shoe on the dais. I have to make sure you and the community knows that involvement in this lifestyle of peddling poison like this to our community, you have to expect the most severe consequences we have.”
Earlier this year in B.C., by comparison, a 27-year-old Vernon man was sentenced to two years less a day for dealing heroin laced with fentanyl as part of a dial-a-dope operation. Among factors taken into account in his sentencing were his lack of a criminal record and the bullying that led him to drop out in Grade 10.
Dealers caught in Metro Vancouver have received sentences ranging from probation to two years in jail (although one high-level dealer did receive 14 years in January 2017). Last year, the B.C. Court of Appeal ruled that street-level fentanyl dealers should receive sentences of between 18 to 36 months, or longer, which is higher than the six to 12 months normally imposed on dealers in B.C. but much lower than the sentences judges are handing out in Manitoba for similar offences.
Most experts argue that harsher sentences are not an effective deterrent and that decriminalization is the answer. The prime minister, however, has made it clear that decriminalization is not going to happen. In the meantime, people are dying and we agree with Manitoba judges that those who peddle the poison should pay the penalty.
