Doug Spencer had one objective when he stood in front of a gym full of students at Fulton Secondary School in Vernon in mid September, armed with a Powerpoint and a career’s worth of experience working for the Vancouver Police Department: to tell students the naked truth about drugs and gangs.
“If only kids knew the truth about gangs and drugs, they’d make better choices,” said the retired constable who spent many years on Vancouver’s gang unit and youth squad.
That thought came to Spencer after he attended seven funerals in 10 days, and spurred him to join the Odd Squad Productions Society, a non-profit which, for the last 26 years has been going into schools in Canada to deliver prevention programs for youth, letting them know what they’re really getting into when the opportunity to join a gang presents itself.
“When you get recruited to sell drugs, join a gang … you don’t know all of the ramifications of that,” he told the Fulton students.
Spencer told the story of a boy who got involved with gangs when he was just 11 years old, and played a video of the boy, by then a young man, speaking about his gang experience.
“The most important thing he says is that they use you. Gangs will use kids your age to sell drugs for them, and they do that because that insulates them from going to jail. You take all the risk, you give them 90 per cent of the money,” Spencer said.
“Not a very good deal.”
Spencer discussed the common gang tactic of giving young people free drugs to get them hooked, and then down the road when they can’t afford the drugs they’re addicted to, they’ve “got to do something for them.”
The retired officer talked about some of the gangs that kids in the area might one day encounter. He said the Hells Angels gang “owns the Okanagan,” telling a story of a time when a few members of the Warlocks gang showed up in Hells Angels territory in Fort McMurray.
“By the afternoon there were 200 Hells Angels in colours there” within 10 hours, he said. “That’s how many guys they had at their disposal.”
“Why do kids join gangs?” Spencer asked his audience rhetorically. “Peer pressure is the biggest reason by far.”
Spencer described the kinds of people kids are dealing with when they become gang-affiliated and start selling drugs.
“They are stone cold killers,” he said. “They enjoy it.”
Spencer also offered his opinion about the safe supply and decriminalization policies that B.C. has pursued.
“My personal opinion of that is they’re throwing fuel on the fire,” he said. “Because what’s happening in Vancouver is the addicts take the free drugs and they sell them and they go get their drugs. They want the strongest drugs available. They don’t want a safe supply. So they’re enabling drug addiction is what they’re doing.”
Spencer said gangs have taken advantage of B.C. decriminalizing possession of small amounts of illicit drugs, with police officers now forced to merely watch as dealers sell small amounts of drugs at a time, “and they can’t do a thing about it.”
Spencer touched upon where these illicit drugs come from, and while he said China is a big producer of fentanyl — a highly potent substance with a high risk of causing overdose — he added it is sometimes produced in our back yard, pointing to a super lab that was busted in Lumby in 2018, one of the largest drug labs ever seen in the province.
He said t he latest trend is criminals mixing fentanyl with a type of animal sedative that lengthens the high, explaining that gangs want people to be addicted to their product.
“They want a return customer.”
He described taking a pill at a party as being akin to playing “Russian roulette,” as a dose of fentanyl is equivalent to a “quarter of a grain of salt, and if you get two quarters you’ll overdose.”
It’s not just illicit drugs that young people need to be wary of, Spencer said, explaining that legal cannabis is becoming more potent over the years and that it can cause psychosis. He said in Vancouver, there is a 200 per cent increase in youth going to emergency rooms under the influence of cannabis.
Spencer also cautioned the students against getting hooked on vaping, saying he spoke to an expert who told him that in 20 years Canada’s medical system is going to be “overwhelmed” with the health repercussions of vaping. He pointed out that most vaping products contain acetone, which is “your mom’s nail polish remover, and you’re sucking that into your lungs.”
Throughout the presentation, Spencer showed clips of interviews with people who got involved with gangs and selling or taking drugs at a young age. None of these clips were intended to fear-monger, he assured.
“I just promised to show you the truth, and the truth is those are the people that you’re dealing with if you sell drugs or use drugs. They’ll kill you.”
Spencer told The Morning Star that after the presentation, a few students came up to him to talk about one of their fellow students who had recently died of overdose. The student’s funeral had been held two days before the presentation.
“One student said ‘I wish you were here a month ago, he might still be alive.’”
To learn more about Odd Squad Productions Society, visit oddsquad.com.
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