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In February, Ottawa appointed its first ever “fentanyl czar,” longtime senior Mountie Kevin Brosseau, to oversee our fight against the deadly synthetic opioid.

However some contend that organized criminals around the world — including Canada — have already entered into a golden age of drug trafficking. For all of his protestations, critics say, Trump may have turbocharged this crime renaissance by firing experts, poisoning results-based co-operation between nations, and emboldening criminals on the dark web. 

“Organized crime, one of the world’s oldest professions, is entering a golden age,” authors and crime experts Misha Glenny and Robert Muggah write in the current issue of Foreign Policy.

This isn’t just a Canadian thing, though there’s plenty to observe in Canada as organized criminals here scramble to keep up with their foreign counterparts.

It seems their networks have become more sophisticated since the pandemic years.

“Cartels, mafia networks, and freelance gangsters quickly learned the ins and outs of private banks, tax havens, special economic zones, container ports, and online markets,” Glenny and Muggah write.

This includes modernizing their leadership.

“Within criminal organizations, digital natives have started replacing less tech-savvy mafia bosses and operatives,” Glenny and Muggah write. “As a result, cybercrime has evolved from lone-wolf attacks to highly skilled criminals hunting in packs.”

Here in Canada, that means that organized criminals are co-operating more than before, Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC) notes in its newly released annual report.

Cocaine is the market in which most organized crime groups are involved, “and involvement is increasing with pricing at its lowest in 25 years,” the CISC notes.

This comes as the number of organized crime groups producing illicit synthetic drugs almost doubled from 2023 to 2024, according to the CISC report.

“Fentanyl and methamphetamine activities continue to expand,” the CISC report adds, noting involvement in fentanyl has increased by 42 per cent since 2019.

There are several reasons why organized crime — and the drug trafficking business in particular — is undergoing a dark renaissance.

Synthetic drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine require no growing season, unlike plant-based drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, opium or heroin.

Propelling things at warp speed is the dark web, which provides “an efficient, covert space to mask or conceal criminal transactions, identities, and other illegal activity,” the CISC writes.

“Examples include the use of underground banking or cryptocurrencies to facilitate the laundering and international movement of money,” the CISC writes. “Such methods provide an avenue that is challenging for law enforcement to trace. They are also highly appealing due to their removed and global nature; there are no geographic or physical limitations to these methods.”

Just weeks after assuming the American presidency, Trump pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who had been serving a life term for running the underground online marketplace Silk Road, where drug dealers and others conducted more than $200 million in illicit trade using bitcoin online.

“I just called the mother of Ross William Ulbricht to let her know that in honor of her and the Libertarian Movement, which supported me so strongly, it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son, Ross,” Trump wrote in a post on his social media platform, Truth Social. “The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”

With the emergence of quicker and simpler methods to make fentanyl as well as fentanyl analogues, the drug became a large-scale player on the illicit market of North America by about 2013.

Around 2020, trafficking networks in the U.S. and Canada began producing fentanyl themselves. Americans jumped in with both feet, despite Trump blaming Canadians for flooding the American market. 

A large majority, 86.2 per cent, of those arrested for illegal fentanyl sales in the U.S. were U.S. citizens, the Sentencing Commission, an independent American federal agency, reported in its report for the 2023 fiscal year.

Groups shipping fentanyl and chemicals to make fentanyl are taking advantage of old reliable routes and tactics that have worked for years to move cocaine, authorities say.

Politics have also played a role in the drug trafficking renaissance.

The quality of governance makes a profound difference, Amy MacKinnon notes in the Feb. 17 edition of Foreign Policy.

She argues that democracies tend to cope with organized crime better than authoritarian regimes.

“In recent years, however, liberal democracies have been on the back foot,” MacKinnon writes. “The 2008 financial crisis, increased migration in the 2010s, and the far-reaching impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have strengthened populist movements across Europe and North America. Populist leaders often circumvent democratic checks and balances, with direct and indirect benefits for organized crime. One of the first acts of the new U.S. Attorney General, for example, was to eliminate anti-corruption units targeting kleptocrats.”

Tensions surrounding Trump globally complicate the fight against illegal drug trafficking.

The Trump administration has accused the Mexican government of colluding with the drug cartels. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum called the accusations “slander.”

President Trump has accused Canada — alongside Mexico — of allowing “vast numbers of people to come in and fentanyl to come in” to the US.

As for the future, organized crime groups are likely to turn to even more potent and profitable fentanyl alternatives, according to the CISC, such as nitazene and medetomidine.