A provincial court judge has handed a North Vancouver fentanyl dealer an unprecedented 14-year jail sentence, saying dealing a dangerous drug that results in serious harm to the community must carry a stiff penalty.
On Monday, Judge Bonnie Craig handed the lengthy jail term to Walter James McCormick, 53, in Richmond provincial court after McCormick pleaded guilty to five drug charges. Those included one charge of trafficking fentanyl in North Vancouver and four charges of possessing drugs, including fentanyl, for the purpose of trafficking in North Vancouver, Langley and Richmond.
In handing down her sentence, Craig acknowledged the lengthy jail term went beyond the usual sentence for drug trafficking and that McCormick “did not create the problem with opioid addiction in the community.”
But she added there are times when the conditions in the community “highlight the need to denounce unlawful conduct.”
“I must recognize the fact that an increasing number of people are dying due to the illegal sale of fentanyl,” she said. “This is something which cannot be ignored, nor can it be minimized.”
Following the decision, Crown prosecutor Oren Bick called the jail term “a significant sentence” that would hopefully deter others from dealing fentanyl.
Bick said in handing down her sentence, the judge paid particular attention to the large amount of fentanyl – 30,000 pills – McCormick had in his possession.
“Traffickers like Mr. McCormick have recently started to use fentanyl to increase their profit margins and decrease their own risk of being caught, with the trade-off being the deadly risk imposed on other people – their customers,” he said.
McCormick was arrested Feb. 17, 2015, in one of the Lower Mainland’s first major fentanyl trafficking busts. He first came to the attention of police after they began an undercover investigation into a surge of overdose deaths in the Downtown Eastside in 2014, which they believed had been caused by “bad heroin.”
According to details of the case described in court, McCormick supplied fentanyl pills to a dealer who then sold them to an undercover police officer posing as a mid-level dealer from Yellowknife. Two exchanges, observed by police surveillance officers, happened at a gas station parking lot on Mountain Highway in Lynn Valley.
When police raided McCormick’s North Vancouver home at 2681 Poplynn Dr., along with his car and storage locker on Main Street, they turned up 30,000 fentanyl pills with a street value of $945,000 – along with cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana and Alprazolam (benzodiazepine) pills worth about another $1 million. Police also seized $172,000 in cash, a .40 calibre pistol, .22 calibre rifle, dyes, fillers and a pill press.
After he was arrested and charged, McCormick was released on $100,000 bail. He was rearrested and charged with more drug offences at the end of June 2016 after staff at the Sandman Inn in Richmond called police in May to report trouble evicting him from his hotel room. Police seized 18 kilograms of vacuum-packed marijuana, two kilograms of cocaine, 1,000 fentanyl pills, more than 4,000 Alprazolam pills and a money counter from his car and hotel room. McCormick has been in custody since June 27.
In asking for a higher-than-usual sentence, Bick called on experts to describe the impact of fentanyl to the judge.
In an expert report presented to the judge, Vancouver Police Department Sgt. Peter Sadler noted drug traffickers began selling fentanyl as OxyContin and heroin in 2012, because “there is much greater profit margin with the sale of fentanyl” and it is easier to import.
According to Sadler, one kilogram of fentanyl can be bought online from manufacturers in China for between $7 and $12 per kilogram, then diluted to produce 7,000 doses per gram. In contrast, one kilogram of heroin costs about $70,000 and is diluted about three and a half times before being sold on the street.
But the dosage of fentanyl is very hard to control, warned experts. People who die from fentanyl overdoses simply stop breathing, they said.
Bick asked Craig to make an example of McCormick and impose an 18-year sentence, recognizing “the harms that fentanyl has caused the community.”
McCormick’s defence lawyer Lawrence Myers argued that wouldn’t be fair. Throwing the book at McCormick won’t solve the fentanyl crisis, he said. “This notion that this problem is somehow going to evaporate because of a sentence is illusory,” he told the judge at the sentencing hearing.
Myers said examples such as the U.S. prove “lengthy periods of incarceration do not deter people.” He asked the judge for between eight and nine years jail time.
In handing down her sentence, Craig said she recognized “a sentence above the established range will not lead to an end to the fentanyl epidemic” but noted the greed of dealers and the lower cost of the drug have been driving its flood into the market and the deaths resulting from that.
She noted there have been no other cases involving anything close to the amount of fentanyl found in McCormick’s possession.
