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B.C. officials have announced a new “track and trace” pilot program using technology they say can reveal patterns about the geographic origins and patterns of the illicit drug supply.
The technology could allow police to identify whether drugs appearing in different regions are coming from the same source.
Officials say it could share, across jurisdictions, how waves of additives in the drug supply are moving across the country.
The program will use lab robotics, gather information from drugs seized by police and provide an “artificial intelligence-assisted dashboard for law enforcement to map and track dangerous drugs in B.C.,” according to a provincial news release.
“By combining chemical analysis with a growing data platform, we can begin to reconstruct production methods and anticipate how harmful supply is evolving across communities,” said Public Safety Minister Nina Krieger at a news conference Friday.
“This intelligence will help law enforcement determine where the greatest harms originate.”
She said the program will not track individuals or criminalize people who use drugs.
“It is focused on understanding and disrupting the supply of the most dangerous drugs in the illicit supply and using those samples that are not being used for criminal prosecutions to provide police valuable intelligence and to protect the public.”
Chief Const. Fiona Wilson of the Victoria Police Department compared the technology to the advent of DNA and said it has the potential to be the most significant advancement in drug intelligence and public health in her almost 30 years of policing.
“One of the biggest challenges today is that we can seize drugs, but we can’t easily connect them,” Wilson said.
“We can’t reliably determine whether drugs found in different communities come from the same source, and we often cannot link overdose trends to changes in supply quickly enough.”
But the pilot will change that, according to Wilson, and allow health officials to create earlier warning systems to alert people to increased drug dangers in their area.
The first phase of the two-year pilot will focus on understanding what is circulating in the illicit drug supply.
The province said early reports from 2026 show a surge in new toxic additives showing up in the drug supply.
Recent contaminants do not always respond to naloxone, which increases the lethality of overdoses as well as the risk of permanent injury, according to the province.
The province will invest $300,000 annually from its gun and gang violence action fund to support the pilot program by Aidos Innovations over the next two years.
Aidos Innovations is a non-profit science institute developed in collaboration with the University of British Columbia.
The pilot is a partnership including the province, various B.C. police forces, UBC and the VGH & UBC Hospital Foundation.
