The above video and following story are excerpts from a Global News investigation called 'It's Murder': How lethal opioids are devastating a small region of Ontario
Story by Andrew Russell, Sam Cooper, Stewart Bell - Global News.
A Global News investigation has revealed new details about who is profiting of the importation of deadly opioids like fentanyl and carfentanil — an opioid so powerful that just a few granules can kill a person.
In Ontario, detectives have described how traffickers can range from a single person to a small-scale business, or large-scale criminal organizations, including Asian crime groups, Italian Mafia, biker gangs and even connections to cartels in Mexico.
“It’s a bit of everybody right now. We haven’t pinned it to one group. We’re seeing it right across the board,” said Det.-Insp. Jim Walker with the Ontario Provincial Police organized crime enforcement bureau. “Organized crime groups will exploit whatever avenue they can, obviously to make the money.”
What separates synthetic opioids from other drugs, Walker said, is the potency. An ounce of product can explode in a community like a bomb, leaving behind a trail of overdoses and shattered families.
Police also have to contend with the availability of sourcing the drugs as anyone with access to a computer can wire money to cities in Southern China and have the drugs delivered in the mail.
Court cases in southern Ontario show how individuals obtain quantities of fentanyl from mail order websites in Southern China, which are then sent through the mail before landing in Ontario.
A 21-year-old Barrie man, Anthony “Tony” Mastromatteo, is serving a seven-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to importing fentanyl in October 2016.
Justice Jonathan Bliss details in his decision Mastromatteo’s connection to cocaine with fentanyl that led to the near-fatal overdoses of five users in downtown Barrie on Oct. 2, 2016, and sent panic throughout the community.
“Words fail to convey the human cost of the fentanyl crisis that communities across the country, and this community in particular, are facing. Words have a sterility to them. Lives lost, literally and figuratively, are not sterile,” Bliss wrote in June 2018.
“To put it bluntly, people are dying. Until his arrest, Anthony Mastromatteo was an unabashed importer and peddler of a variety of drugs including, most significantly, fentanyl.”
Marilyn Muir, who worked as nurse at a local hospital in Barrie for nine years, lost her son to an overdose involving suspected cocaine and fentanyl. She believes the opioid crisis is continuing unabated.
“There are people profiting off the death of our children — and they’re still profiting. They’re still going to profit and it’s going to get worse and worse,” Muir said.
