The sudden, nation-wide appearance of a powerful industrial chemical called BTMPS in the US fentanyl supply – but not in Canada’s – raises intriguing questions about fentanyl markets, how they work and who controls them.

According to the Vancouver Sun’s Kim Bolan, the chemical bis (2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-4-piperidyl) sebacate, or BTMPS, was first detected in fentanyl in Phoenix in June 2024. By October, it had been found nearly simultaneously in nine states from coast to coast.

“You wouldn’t find this in Canadian fentanyl,” RCMP Cpl. Arash Seyed told Bolan. “We don’t see this up here, and we don’t see our stuff down there.”

Within weeks of its first detection in the US drug supply, BTMPS was making up to 30 per cent of drugs sampled, often exceeding the share of fentanyl.

BTMPS is not approved for human consumption, has many toxic characteristics and is often used in industrial applications in plastic. It does not provide a high. Its sudden arrival is a mystery, although a 2011 study suggested it may mitigate the effect of opioids in rats.

Is this a bizarre harm reduction measure? Probably not.

Senior American researchers, who now are also reporting an apparent drop in the fentanyl supply, cannot explain the arrival of BTMPS, or why it appeared simultaneously in so many locations. Logically, however, a decision was made at a high level in the American fentanyl supply chain to introduce BTMPS at a national scale. Criminal labs secured supplies, and widely separated local markets felt the impact almost in lockstep.

Little is known about the chemists at the heart of fentanyl production, whether they share their knowledge or what production innovations they pursue, but Canadians have been in the front ranks of narcotics production since the 1970s. If BTMPS provides some important advantage, Canadian criminal chemists would be quick to follow the US lead. So far, they have not.

Even less is known – or at least, shared with the public – about the formal and informal governance arrangements of national and transnational criminal networks, which often collaborate at the senior level while shooting it out at the street level.

Many of the labs seized by RCMP enforcement actions in BC have been filthy back-yard affairs in rural areas, far removed from the facilities needed to develop new fentanyl products. Lab workers are low level players, rotating in for a couple of weeks of production, then heading home, often unaware of who their ultimate employer is or the customers.

Last year’s seizure of the Falkland superlab was a different matter, however, with massive production capacity and sophisticated equipment to create and test various fentanyl formulations. Canadian criminals have the knowledge and facilities to produce anything.

The absence of BTMPS in the Canadian supply is further proof, Seyed notes, that Canada is not exporting fentanyl to the United States. It also suggests that Canadian criminal networks are able to determine what gets sold on this side of the border, despite wishful rhetoric in Washington about a fifty-first state.

American markets, however, have long been open to Canadian imports of other drugs. Canadian crime organizations can export at will and do.

According to Canadian organized crime historian Stephen Schneider, Hells Angels and Satan’s Choice motorcycle gangs were major suppliers during the 1970s of “Canadian Blue,” a Valium substitute, as well as LSD, methamphetamines and other drugs at industrial scale to the American market. Canada had the chemists and the production capacity.

During the glory days of the marijuana and cocaine trade, plant geneticists took centre stage, people like Charles “Reeferman” Scott, a BC marijuana specialist with an enormous range of cultivars, as well as indoor and outdoor growing experience, who went on to be an inductee in the High Times Hall of Fame. (Scott was interviewed at length by Ian Mulgrew for his book Bud. Inc: Inside Canada’s Marijuana Industry.)

Scott and other Canadians created the famous BC Bud strain that found favour in American markets, often in exchange for cocaine from South America, despite the massive local weed production both in the US and Mexico that competed for market share.

Can organized crime organizations choose which markets to enter and which to avoid? In Dreamland, his unmatched history of the US opiate epidemic, Sam Quinones carefully details how the Xalisco Boys, a Mexican cartel looking for new market opportunities, implemented a business plan to focus on small American cities ignored by other mobs. By prohibiting gunplay and other high-risk behaviour, the Xalisco organization rolled out a devastatingly effective strategy to sell fentanyl.

Although BTMPS is missing from Canada’s fentanyl supply, other adulterants are not. The latest overdose death statistics in Canada show a 12 per cent decrease between January and September 2024, but an ominous increase in xylazine, a veterinary tranquilizer.

Common sense and history suggest that the complete absence of BTMPS in this country is the result of a choice, made somewhere in the criminal networks controlling fentanyl, to go a different direction in Canada, at least so far.

With Canada now committed to joint enforcement with American authorities against cross-border fentanyl traffickers – possibly designated as terrorist organizations – it is more urgent than ever that the RCMP and other police agencies understand what is crossing the border, what is not, and why.