SHAWN WILLIAMS: Good evening and welcome to Turning Leaf, a radio show for an always changing Canada in an ever shifting world. I’m Shawn Williams in Ontario, and first tonight for your attention, CBC International Correspondent Geoff Norman brings the story of a new kind of drug ring circling round the southern provinces and territories: communities of Canadian citizens running pleasure prescriptions to America, and keeping the change.
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MAN: I don’t see how we’re doin’ anything, ah, illegal or, ah, against the law or anything like that. People, there, they need food, and you see people getting’ it for ‘em. People they need clothes. Way we see it, people got just as much need for us as they do for anything else.
GEOFF NORMAN: Dressed in a plaid red flannel shirt and plain blue trousers, Leroy, who asked that his real name be withheld, is probably the very last person one might expect to find at the head of Canada’s fastest growing illegal drug ring. All the same, there he is, coordinating an organization over 250 strong throughout Ontario and southern Manitoba, peddling high-priced prescription cocktails to Americans in border cities like Buffalo and Detroit.
International drug dealing between Canadian and U.S. border states and provinces has been on the rise for quite some time, though illegal drugs traditionally flow from the U.S., making their way northward from the warmer climates and more tolerant governments of Latin America and the Caribbean. What makes Leroy’s operation so markedly different from what’s been seen here in the past, and what has the Governement so worried is the source: Leroy’s organization gets pharmaceutical grade drugs directly from the Canadian Government, mixes them in an underground lab somewhere in Manitoba and ships the finished concoctions to a core group of members for distribution throughout Canada and the U.S. Sources say Leroy’s unique blends are among the most concentrated highs on the drug market.
LEROY: People think their drugs have got to come out of Columbia or Nicaragua or Jamaica or somewheres. The truth of it is it’s the doctors who’ve got the good stuff, eh. They’ve got the goods, and you know its safe because it’s from the government.
NORMAN: A virtual army of cohorts, most elderly or disabled, gather prescriptions on Leroy’s instructions, drawing their symptoms direct from the Canadian Medical Association’s handbook, reporting to their physicians, and hoping for a profitable diagnosis. Depending on the drug, prescriptions can fetch as much as $45, money some say they couldn’t do without.
ELDERLY MAN: I’ve been getting prescriptions of Prozac and Viagra for [NAME DELETED] for, oh, about eight months now, and I don’t see anything wrong. I’m poor, I’m old, I’m out of work, and I’m entitled to these drugs, the Government says I’m entitled. If I sell them so I can eat… [pause] …what good are prescriptions going for if I starve?
NORMAN: Some might say that you’re not really entitled to drugs you don’t need, though, would you agree with that position.
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ELDERLY MAN: Well, yes, but I’m entitled to them. The government says I am. I can’t work. The government says I can’t work, so if I don’t do this, I do dick all. Which is better?
NORMAN: Leroy says he began experimenting with prescription drugs in his late teens when a fire at his uncle’s pharmacy in southern Manitoba left hundreds of prescriptions unguarded and unaccountable. After graduating from university with a chemistry degree, he’s been combining, modifying, and reducing standard, off the shelf prescriptions to draw out their hidden potential, not as pharmaceudicals, but as recreational drugs.
MAN: If you look at the amount of money being wasted on this, the category of fraud being perpetrated on, you know, good doctors and good people, it’s probably our number one priority right now.
NORMAN: Chadwick Sorensen, who works with the Department of Justice, has been homing in on Leroy’s practice for over a year now, but, he says, due to the nature of the group is having trouble pinning them down.
SORENSEN: It’s not like they’ve just got this base with all the drugs and stuff there, right? It’s hundreds and hundreds of people, just normal people getting this stuff and mailing it to one of over a dozen collection points, eh. We caught one guy coming out of a Canada Post outlet in St. Boniface—he was 83 years old, white, used to be an insurance salesman. The killer there, right, was that this guy had Alzheimer’s. Once we started asking questions, he forgot everything he every might have known in the first place. This is really a new kind of crime. We’re not quite sure how to deal with it.
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NORMAN: [whispering] Here in his underground lab, Leroy breaks apart prescriptions gathered from all over Canada, grouping like drugs in piles of crushed caplets and powders. He looks the part of a medieval alchemist, equal parts scientist, magician, and renegade outlaw. Down here, he’s completely transformed from the soft-spoken man with a bit of a Molson-muscle you might run into on the street. Down here, Leroy is in his element.
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LEROY: A lot of people don’t know this, eh, but if you mix Penicillin, Viagara, Prozac, and a mild anti-biotic you get basically the same thing as ecstasy. But it won’t kill your brain cells the same way. It won’t kill ‘em at all. Same thing with codeine, Tylenol, and dried oregano, which, you know, gives the same effect, and consistency if you mix it right, as marijuana, with none of the adverse health affects. And, you know, and this is the other thing, none of my products show up on drug tests. They just don’t. They’re better for you, they’re a better high, and nobody will ever know.
NORMAN: That all seems well and good, but some would say that what you’re doing is, well, far greater than illegal, immoral, would say that you’re essentially stealing for the people of Canada to get a few people high and make money for yourself.
LEROY: Now hold it there, it’s not just me here, it’s a lot of people making money that need to make money. I have people out there who can’t feed themselves without this.
NORMAN: Yes.
LEROY: And, looking besides that, its not like I’m stealing these drugs. My associates are perfectly entitled to them through the Canada Health Act of 1984. And its not like there’s any other way to get them. The fact is the products I provide are safer, better, and healthier than anything else out there. Who’s doing the public a disservice then, you tell me. Me, giving people a reliable safe way to enjoy themselves, or these guys in Detroit with glock nines and forty-fives, selling crap I wouldn’t put in my lawnmower, much less my body, shooting up their own neighborhoods.
NORMAN: Do you carry a weapon yourself?
LEROY: What do you mean?
NORMAN: A weapon, do you carry a gun?
LEROY: Of course not. People hear the word ‘drugs’ and they think we’re going in and ruining society and what not. It’s not these lowlifes come in off the street down here and pick up a couple of pills. I make a high quality product and I sell it to high quality people. It’s university students who want to have a good time at the weekend. It’s professionals, doctors and lawyers, maybe even your lawyer, Geoff, who just want to enjoy themselves.
NORMAN: Does it bother you that there are people in government, many of them, that would like to see you put away for a very long time? What is it you’d do if you were caught, if the RCMP stormed down to find us here right now?
LEROY: What people don’t understand is I’m helping people. For you, maybe you don’t need a little help to have a good time. Maybe you enjoy yourself all the time, but for a lot of us, we like a little boost. If you look at the numbers of people that go out and poison themselves on 26ers every night, if you go down to the street corners and see those people you’ll see that I am the very nicest fish in this little substance pond the government wants to dry up. If they come someday, I have more friends than they know, in government, in law. I don’t know how quickly they’d put me anyplace, or for how long. I’m just a citizen. I’m just doing what I can, and I’m helping others to do the same.
NORMAN: While it appears Leroy and his group are safe from capture for the present, sources inside the government say they are stepping up their assault on illegal prescription trafficking, starting with an internal audit of doctors set to begin this coming February. Leroy says he expects to expand his empire to include Alberta and parts of Saskatchewan in the coming year. For CBC’s Turning Leaf, I’m Geoff Norman.
WILLIAMS: Geoff Norman somewhere in Manitoba tonight. Thanks very much, Geoff. In international news, the U.K. has announced a major…
