(LifeSiteNews) — A “safe supply” drug advocate has admitted that children probably use drugs diverted from government programs.
During an annual general meeting of Moms Stop the Harm (MSTH), an advocacy group that champions radical harm-reduction policies, Dr. Andrea Sereda, a prominent Canadian advocate for the “safe supply” drug program, revealed that kids are likely using diverted opioids.
“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 declared during the June 1 meeting.
“Kids experiment with everything, and we need to be honest to ourselves that kids probably experiment with diverted safer supply as well,” Sereda continued.
“Safe supply” is a euphemism for government-provided drugs given to addicts under the assumption that a more controlled batch of narcotics reduces the risk of overdose. Critics of the policy argue that giving addicts drugs only enables their behavior, puts the public at risk, disincentivizes recovery from addiction and has not reduced – and sometimes has even increased – overdose deaths when implemented.
Sereda even gave the phenomenon of children using diverted “safe supply drugs”a positive spin, claiming that one parent told her these drugs kept her child alive “longer” than expected.
“I met a parent about a year ago who had lost their child to a fentanyl overdose,” she said. “This parent approached me, and they told me that their child had been using safe supply given them to them by a friend.”
“I thought this parent was going to be angry with me, but that parent told me that that diverted safe supply had kept their child (…) alive longer than the otherwise [they] would have been,” she continued.
Sereda has been a strong advocate for the program and founded Canada’s first safer supply program in 2016 at the London InterCommunity Health Centre (LIHC) in London, Ontario.
Previously, when speaking to Parliament or publicly addressing Canadians, Sereda has denied the possibility of children consuming “safe supply” drugs.
In May 2023, she told the London Free Press that, “Not a single physician critic of safer supply has been able to provide us with an example of medications being sold to children. This seems to be the boogeyman of safer supply. It is silly.”
Similarly, Sereda told the House of Commons health committee in February that there is no evidence that children are taking the “safe supply” drugs.
“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?” asked Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Todd Doherty.
”We have no evidence that they (safer supply hydromorphone tablets) are ending up in the hands of children,” Sereda responded.
Later, Conservative MP Laila Goodridge asked the same question, and Sereda answered, “They’re not being sold to kids.”
However, it may be that Sereda tells a different story when she believes she is not being recorded, as her remarks to the meeting seem to suggest.
During the meeting, she congratulated the Drug User Liberation Front’s distribution of “unadulterated crystal meth and cocaine.”
“If physicians could prescribe that, and this is where I’m afraid there’s a mole like on that other Zoom call earlier this week, right? But if physicians could prescribe crystal meth and cocaine, I think we would actually start to get somewhere,” she said, apparently referring to a National Post article, which published secret audio recordings from activists planning to disrupt a recovery-oriented addiction conference in Vancouver.
It is unclear why Sereda would not know the meeting was being recorded; that it would be captured and downloaded to YouTube was made clear in the opening remarks.
Notably, Sereda’s admission comes after the program was deemed such a disaster in British Columbia that the province asked Trudeau recriminalize drugs in public spaces. Nearly two weeks later, the Trudeau government announced it would “immediately” end the province’s drug program.
Beginning in early 2023, Trudeau’s federal policy in effect decriminalized hard drugs on a trial-run basis in British Columbia.
Under the policy, the federal government allowed people within the province to possess up to 2.5 grams of hard drugs without criminal penalty. Selling drugs remained a crime.
Since its implementation, the province’s drug policy has been widely criticized, especially after it was found that the province broke three different drug-related overdose records in the first month the new law was in effect.
The effects of decriminalizing hard drugs in various parts of Canada have been exposed in Aaron Gunn’s recent documentary, Canada is Dying, and in the U.K. Telegraph journalist Steven Edginton’s mini-documentary, Canada’s Woke Nightmare: A Warning to the West.
Gunn says he documents the “general societal chaos and explosion of drug use in every major Canadian city.”
“Overdose deaths are up 1,000 percent in the last 10 years,” he said in his film, adding that “(e)very day in Vancouver four people are randomly attacked.”
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