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They can’t deny it anymore: so-called “safe supply” is being diverted and sold on the streets, including to kids. Police in London, Ont., held a news conference on Monday to lay out how bad the situation really is and, in part, to play defence.

The news was actually broken almost two weeks ago by my friend and colleague Adam Zivo. For more than a year, Zivo has been documenting the harms surrounding the safe supply plan being pushed by health activists and funded by the Trudeau government.

In a July 2 column published in National Post, Zivo documented how opioid pills seized by police in London went from just a few hundred in 2019 to more than 30,000 in 2023. On Monday, London police confirmed those numbers.

“The diversion of safe supply is occurring in this community, and it is impacting the people who live here,” said London Police Chief Thai Truong.

“Diverted safe supply is being resold into our community, it is being trafficked into other communities, and it is being used as currency in exchange for fentanyl, fuelling the drug trade.”

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Safe supply is the idea that you give an addict a clean and safe pharmaceutical grade opioid to use rather than tainted fentanyl off the streets. According to proponents, you stop overdoses and keep people alive until you can get them into treatment.

In theory, this sounds great, but as is often the case with theories, those who push them don’t think of the unintended consequences. Across the country, we have seen people who are prescribed hydromorphone — also known by the brand name Dilaudid, or the street name Dillies — sell their prescription pills for money, or, as the chief said, exchange them for fentanyl.

Unlike other treatments for addicts like methadone, safe supply doesn’t require any supervision, they don’t take the pills at the pharmacy. Instead, the addict is given dozens of 8mg pills per day which come with a high street value.

There have been doctors raising the alarm about safe supply across the country, and journalists like me and Zivo have written stories, hosted podcasts, and published video interviews on the topic. The activists have denied there was anything wrong, the politicians have claimed that accusations of safe supply being diverted were misinformation and disinformation.

Despite evidence collected from the streets of Vancouver, the pleas from families experiencing hell in the suburbs of the lower mainland or questions raised in London, it was dismissed.

Dr. Andrea Sereda, one of the main doctors behind the London safe supply program, refused to answer many straightforward questions about safe supply at a Parliamentary committee earlier this year and tried to infer that pills were not being diverted.

“Do you agree that it’s possible that diverted opioids are ending up in the hands of people they aren’t prescribed to, or even children, yes or no?” Conservative MP Todd Doherty asked her in February.

“We have no evidence that they are ending up in the hands of children. We have no scientific data that supports those assertions,” Sereda said.

She lives in a city where police seized 30,000 Dillies the previous year, and she answers by saying she has no scientific evidence to back the idea that diversion was happening.

Did she never speak to the police?

A while later, Sereda was speaking to an activist group called Moms Stop the Harms — and apparently when she thought no one who disagrees with her would notice — she admitted diversion was happening.

“I’m not going to stand up here and say that some kids, some adolescents, are not accessing diverted safe supply and using diverted safe supply,” she said.

Sereda isn’t the only one turning a blind eye to the problem of diversion. The London police clearly knew this was happening and kept this information from the public.

The people shaping Canada’s response to the opioid crisis will hide behind the shield of science and claim they are experts. It’s better to state clearly what they are: Activists pushing a harmful agenda.