Updated, 12:45pm January 15, 2021
The Sackville RCMP arrested three people Wednesday and seized what they believe to be methamphetamine pills and cocaine.
According to an RCMP release Friday morning, police executed a search warrant on Wednesday at a home on Upper Aboujagane Road. During the search, police seized quantities of what they believed to be methamphetamine pills, cocaine, drug trafficking paraphernalia and an amount of money.
Neighbours reported a police presence on Upper Aboujagane Road, just outside town limits near the intersection with Pond Shore Road, on Wednesday.
The RCMP say a 32-year-old man from Rivière du Portage was arrested at the scene, and is being held in custody on an unrelated matter.
A 36-year-old man and 37-year-old woman–both from Sackville–were also arrested outside a nearby residence, and were later released pending a court appearance.
Charges have not yet been laid.
The police say the search warrant and two arrests are part of a drug investigation that began in March 2020 in the Sackville community.
Members of the Shediac RCMP, Southeast Crime Reduction Unit and Police Dog Services assisted during the search.
The RCMP news release on this incident concludes with a plea for information from local residents, either through Crimestoppers or the local police.
Sergeant Paul Gagné of the Sackville RCMP says that this is the first search warrant executed as part of the investigation, but that more will come, pending judicial authorizations.
Gagné says that’s typical of the type of investigation.
“These types of investigations, because we’re talking about drug trafficking, we’ll seize cell phones, maybe computers, and we need further judicial authorizations, production orders or search warrants, to search the hard drives of these electronics,” he says.
Gagné didn’t say if this investigation is linked to others in the province, but that, “drug trafficking is seldom something that’s done in isolation.”
“Somebody had to traffic drugs to those people living there,” says Gagné. “So trafficking is very much something that’s intertwined… and related to organized crime, obviously.”
NO INDICATION OF LINKS TO OVERDOSE DEATHS
Gagné says there’s no indication the investigation is linked to recent overdose deaths in the Sackville area, but he also can’t rule it out.
“Even if you find drugs of whatever somebody overdosed on sometimes proving the source of where that drug comes from is a very complicated investigation itself,” says Gagné.
Gagné says he has heard concerns about overdose deaths from elected officials and people in the community. “This is something we’re all concerned with, right? Whenever somebody dies of a drug overdose, I mean, we all want to understand why this is, why it happened,” says Gagné. “And it’s our job to do so.”
While deaths from overdose are often met with calls for more law enforcement, more and more voices are calling for other solutions.
In November, CHMA’s Meg Cunningham spoke with Donald MacPherson, the director of the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition at Simon Fraser University.
MacPherson says clinics focussing on safe supplies of opioids are key to combatting the overdose crisis.
“We would do this in any other poisoning situation,” McPherson says. “If the food was poisoned or the water was poisoned, we’d be helping people access clean water, clean food.”
“The drug market now is poisoned. We really need to be helping people access a safer supply of substances and safe supply of opioids that are pharmaceutical products,” says McPherson. “We would see far, far fewer toxic drug deaths.”
