Global Courant
Aidan Tate died alone, but not alone.
His family was sleeping upstairs. They had eaten together earlier that evening. Then the 19-year-old went to his basement bedroom to play the guitar. His father, Phil, came by to say good night and bring his son something to drink.
Aidan Tate is seen on a family vacation in May 2017. The 19-year-old resident of Peterborough, Ontario, died of a suspected drug overdose in March 2023. (Philip Tate)
“People called us thinking he died in the street or something. It didn’t happen like that,” said Phil Tate. “We certainly have our street problems here in Peterborough, but the addiction is in the suburbs.”
Aidan Tate fell victim to a suspected drug overdose in early March. The tragedy is so raw and recent that the toxicology results are still pending. But authorities think they know at least part of the answer: a benzodiazepine he bought over the Internet.
Bromazolam has never been approved for medical use anywhere in the world. Yet the powerful sedative is openly sold and shipped in Canada. Used by dealers to enhance other street drugs, it often proves deadly when mixed with opioids, as it both depresses the airways and counteracts the effects of antidotes such as naloxone.
Phil Tate was all too aware that his son struggled with a dependence on benzodiazepines – a drug he was first prescribed as a young teenager to treat anxiety and panic attacks. Aidan had sought help but was removed from an outpatient program after admitting to buying drugs on the street.
Phil and his ex-wife, Sarah Budd, had done their best to help him as he struggled with withdrawal, relapse, and experimentation with other substances.
What they couldn’t protect him from was easy online access to the benzos he craved.
“It’s a click away,” Tate said. “Whatever you want…and you can have it shipped from anywhere.”
Deeper high, increased risk
Benzodiazepine-laced opioids — or “benzodope,” as they’re commonly referred to — have swept across Canada like a wave, with users embracing both the deeper high and the increased risk.
Last year in Ontario, benzodiazepines were found in the blood samples of nearly half of all overdose deaths, killing 1,170 people. In BC, where the surge began, the figure fell from a similar peak in 2021 to closer to 28 percent — an additional 643 deaths.
But no part of the country has remained immune. Public health warnings have been issued in New Brunswick about bromazolam and other benzos in the drug supply; Sudbury, Ontario; Brandon, Man.; the Northwestern Territories; across Alberta; and BC
In March, Peterborough, Ontario, followed suit in the wake of several bromazolam-related deaths, including that of Aidan Tate.
“The reality is that the supply of drugs is changing very quickly right now. It’s hard for people who use drugs to know what they’re getting. It’s a roulette with their lives,” said Dr. Thomas Piggott, Peterborough’s medical officer of health.
Piggott says benzos and opioids are a particularly dangerous combination.
“I couldn’t tell you exactly how potent one or two or more of these pills are, but certainly because they’re combined with other types of drugs, the risks, especially when used with fentanyl, would increase significantly,” said Piggott. “It can certainly increase sedation and increase the likelihood that someone will overdose.”
Dr. Thomas Piggott, medical officer of health for Peterborough, Ont., is concerned about online sales of the drug Bromazolam. The city of 135,000 has seen more than 90 overdose deaths since early 2022. (Marnie Luke/CBC News)
Knowing that bromazolam and other benzos — controlled substances by law — are now widely available online makes it all the more concerning, says Piggott.
In 2022, Peterborough, a city of just over 135,000 people, had 59 overdose deaths. In the first five months of 2023there were 31 dead.
“It’s a crisis,” Piggott said. “That’s more than one a week. And we’re a small region, a small community. If this was the case 20 or 30 years ago, this would be front page news every week. And we’ve gone numb.”
Medicines shipped via Canada Post
Piggott’s office told the Ontario Ministry of Health about the website where Aidan bought the Bromazolam, who in turn shared the information with Health Canada, who passed it on to the RCMP.
A letter was sent to the host provider and the site, Anabolicsca.net, was taken offline within days.
But CBC News was able to find dozens of other portals still selling Bromazolam through a simple Google search. The drug is available in pill or powder form for just $100, and ships directly to your door by Canada Post.
Some of the sites claim to be based in Canada and provide contact numbers and addresses. They all seem fake – the phone numbers aren’t in use and the addresses match people’s homes, picked seemingly at random.
One is a humble bungalow in Sudbury, Ontario. CBC News spoke to the owner – a retired hairdresser – who says he was completely unaware of the website and has no connection with it. (Domain registration and server records suggest that one particular site, and many of the others, are actually located far offshore, in China.)
This is an example of one of dozens of websites illegally offering bromazolam – a controlled substance – for sale to Canadian customers. (CBC News)
In their FAQ section, the websites often make it clear that it is all a ruse. Buyers are told that the only way to communicate with the company – and pay – is via email.
And there’s a lot of emphasis on how the drugs are shipped domestically via XpressPost, out of the reach of snooping customs and police officers.
“Is there a risk of seizure?” asks one site rhetorically.
“Absolutely not. It’s impossible,” is the answer given. “All mail sent within Canada will not go through customs, so domestic mail cannot be seized.”
Increased inspections
Strictly speaking, this is not true. In a statement, a Canada Post spokesperson noted that the company employs teams of postal inspectors who are “trained to detect and remove non-mailable items from the postal system.” Efforts to intercept fentanyl and other drugs ramped up in 2019, with more inspection teams and the deployment of screening technology at sorting sites in Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal.
However, it is all like looking for needles in a very large haystack. Last year, Canada Post delivered 6.6 billion packages and letters to 17.2 million addresses nationwide.
CBC News requested interviews with representatives from Health Canada, the Canada Border Services Agency and the RCMP to learn more about their efforts to monitor the illegal sale of benzodiazepines online. All declined, instead issuing statements highlighting the challenges in tackling digital and cross-border crime.
“Websites selling illegal substances often appear online for a short time and then the sites are shut down or moved to another online host. Often it is not possible to determine whether the site is located (hosted) in Canada or not,” wrote HealthCanada.
“Cross-border crime knows no borders; we live in an increasingly global and interconnected world,” the RCMP said.
Yet the source of most of the synthetic drugs flooding North American markets is not difficult to trace. Early in the fentanyl crisis, Chinese chemical companies were identified as the main global exporters of the potent opioid, even offering small-scale overseas deliveries by mail.
China as source
Under pressure from the US, the Chinese government banned the export of fentanyl in 2019, but the companies remain closely involved in the illicit trade. Now they ship precursor chemicals in bulk to countries like Mexico, where local laboratories synthesize opioids and methamphetamines, which are then smuggled into the US and Canada by drug cartels.
It’s likely that bromazolam, which is often cut into fentanyl, arrives by the same route, says Louise Shelley, director of the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) on the campus of George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia. coming out doesn’t make it any easier to quit, she notes.
“They’re like nesting dolls where one company is in the other, in the other, so not all of them are known. You have to do really sophisticated data analysis to figure out who’s behind it,” Shelley said.
Aidan Tate, then 6, and his father, Phil, are seen at a fall fair in Norwood, Ontario, in October 2010. Aidan’s family hopes that people will remember Aidan for how he lived rather than how he died. (Philip Tate)
Not that it matters if the Chinese government refuses to crack down.
“You need a lot of political will in China to deal with this,” Shelley said. “And there is no clear sign that the Chinese are targeting this chemical industry.”
None of this is comforting to Aidan Tate’s family.
His mother, Sarah Budd, can’t understand why bromazolam is still for sale online in Canada months after her son’s death.
“I think the least that can happen is[these sites]get shut down. There should be a whole task force looking into it and stopping it,” Budd said.
Sarah Budd looks at photos of her late son, Aidan Tate. Budd warns parents about the dangers of illegal online sales of benzodiazepines such as bromazolam. (Rob Krbavac/CBC News)
Meanwhile, she has a warning for other families.
“The drug dealers are online. They’re not just at a party, they’re not just at school. Your kid can be the perfect kid, never leave home, and he can still be a drug addict, because he can order it (Online ) just like candy and it comes right to your door,” she said.
“It’s just the worst nightmare imaginable,” Budd said, suppressing a sob. “I miss him every day. I’m like a broken record. I just want him back. I just want him back. I want him back.”
Jonathon Gatehouse can be reached via email at [email protected], or via the CBC’s digitally encrypted Securedrop system at
