N.L.'s drug supply is getting deadlier. Here's what experts say can be done

Tim Hogan remembers when the drugs started pouring into Newfoundland and Labrador.

Before the early 2000s, police only saw pockets of cocaine, scattered here and there. Then, suddenly, use of the illicit stimulant exploded.

"It was easier to get a gram of coke than it was a gram of weed, at the time," he said.

Hogan, a former sergeant with the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary who worked in drug enforcement for years, says a new opiate soon followed the new, booming cocaine trade. Suddenly, it wasn't just pot and pills the police force was finding on street corners.

"We weren't even sure what was happening. … [Informants] were calling them 'cottons,'" he said. "There was cottons on the street."

The RNC soon discovered the addictive power of Oxycontin, a prescription painkiller.

"There was a rise in armed robberies, there was a rise in break and enters, and it was all connected to the Oxycontin craze," Hogan said. 

These days, police and harm reduction workers worry fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that's quickly replacing heroin as the drug of choice for dealers, is moving into the market. At least 11 people have died in the past month from cocaine or opiate-related overdoses.

As the provincial government scrambles to order more naloxone — a drug that reverses opiate overdoses — there remains a marked absence of policy to deal with what police have warned will become the norm.

Hogan and the RNC's drug enforcement team took a hardline approach to the drug trade in the mid-2000s, eventually launching operations Roadrunner and Razorback to diminish the amount and variety of substances reaching the streets. The cops mainly targeted organized crime rings who smuggled in cocaine from British Columbia. 

At times, it felt almost like a game of whack-a-mole.

"You're never going to get rid of it all," Hogan said. "But you can certainly have them looking over their shoulder, and wondering if you're going to be there."

Hogan's answer to the drug trade, once upon a time, was cracking down on the people bringing it in. But emerging evidence shows that historic response no longer works to keep the public safe from new, more powerful drugs like fentanyl.

Around 2010, "there was the overprescribing of opioids like Percocet, oxycodone, Oxycontin," explains Nick Boyce, a senior policy analyst with the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, an advocacy organization based out of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.