B.C. man convicted of fentanyl trafficking after judge rejects claim drugs belonged to a friend

The provincial courthouse in Nanaimo, B.C. (Courthouse Libraries BC)

A B.C. man has been convicted of possessing fentanyl for the purpose of trafficking despite claiming the drugs were not his – a defence the judge said he could not "accept or even entertain."

Kerry Wallace Chang was found guilty in a Nanaimo court this week and the decision was published Thursday.

Chang admitted to possessing 62.24 grams of fentanyl found in his bedroom when the Emergency Response Team raided the home in November of 2020 – but said it was for his personal use. He also "conceded" that an additional 471 grams of fentanyl found in the living room were for the purpose of trafficking but claimed it belonged to a friend.

"He denies possessing it in the legal sense of the word," Justice Robin A.M. Baird wrote.

The investigation into allegations that drugs were being trafficked out of the Nanaimo home was launched after the RCMP received a report from the Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Centre that an inmate was using jailhouse phones "to communicate with people, including Mr. Chang, about drug trafficking in the Nanaimo area," the court heard.

Recordings of those phone calls were entered into evidence and showed that Chang was "dealing fentanyl to street retailers from his house," the decision said, also noting that Chang admitted that selling drugs had been his "only occupation for a long time."

Chang did not dispute this. Rather, he said that he stopped trafficking in fentanyl roughly four months before the raid, after he was seriously hurt in a car accident. The injuries he sustained were serious and included a broken neck, back and sternum, a shattered ankle and internal injuries.

"Mr. Chang claims, in effect, that he was forced to abandon his fentanyl trafficking business because of physical incapacity," according to the decision

The judge didn’t buy it.

"I do not for a second believe that Mr. Chang suddenly stopped trafficking fentanyl because of his car accident," the judge said.

"Mr. Chang was heavily entrenched in the local fentanyl trafficking scene, and would not voluntarily have relinquished his habitual lucrative trade activities notwithstanding his injuries."

Baird also said he was not persuaded that Chang would not have been physically capable of running his trafficking operation.

"It involved no energy or effort and, in fact, was perfectly suited to a person with physical limitations," the decision says,.

While the judge said the evidence supported Chang's claim that the home was a "flop house" frequented by people who used and sold drugs, he said he could not believe that a friend of Chang's would have left the amount of drugs he did in the living room.

"No drug dealer in his right mind would leave inventory of this value unattended, especially in a houseful of fentanyl addicts," Baird wrote, saying that the drugs would have had a wholesale value of $10,000 and a street value of up to $90,000.

When it came to the fentanyl in the bedroom, Chang said his injury had turned him into a "raging" fentanyl addict since being injured and that it was all for his own consumption in "large and continuous doses."

Baird said he was willing to concede that some of the drugs were for personal use but that he had "no hesitation in concluding that most of it was intended for sale or distribution, including the product found in his bedroom."

The judge found that the evidence presented in Chang's defence did not raise a reasonable doubt of his guilt.