Yellowknife fentanyl dealer receives 3.5 year sentence

A Yellowknife judge has served notice that even low level fentanyl dealers who ply their trade in the North will be dealt with harshly.

Justice Louise Charbonneau sentenced 32-year-old Rory Moore to three and a half years in prison. Moore, who is originally from Surrey, British Columbia,was caught supplying a street level dealer with small amounts of the deadly painkiller.

He is only the second person to be sentenced for fentanyl trafficking in the Northwest Territories.

"It may have taken a bit longer to get here," said Charbonneau of the drug. "But to think the outcome here would be any different than it has been anywhere else is delusional. It kills people... Those who make such an addictive and highly dangerous drug available to others have a high level of blameworthiness."

To give the judge a sense of how dangerous the drug is, the prosecutor submitted statistics on fentanyl-related overdoses in British Columbia.

In 2012, five per cent of people who died from drug overdoses had taken fentanyl. In 2014, fentanyl accounted for 25 per cent of fatal overdoses. In the first eight months of 2015, that number had risen to 35 per cent.

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In the N.W.T. there was an average of one fentanyl overdose death per year between 2012 and 2015, according to the prosecutor.

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According to his lawyer, Moore was selling the drug to supply his own addiction to it. Jay Bran said a long prison term would set back Moore's recovery from his addiction. In a pre sentence report, Moore said he is now "thankful and amazed" he can go one or two days without thinking about the drug.

Charbonneau commended Moore for his effort to break his addiction. But she also challenged his assertion that it was not his intention to get young people hooked on fentanyl. Charbonneau said Moore was supplying another dealer, Dayle Eldon Hein, with the drug to sell on the street and had no way of knowing who Hein was selling to.

Hein is facing five counts of drug trafficking. He's scheduled to be sentenced in December.

Charbonneau handed down the first sentence for fentanyl trafficking in the Northwest Territories last December, sentencingWilliam Nelson Castro, a high level fentanyl dealer, to six years in prison.

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Like Moore, Castro pleaded guilty to trafficking the drug, after police found 90 pills in his apartment, along with more than $200,000 in cash and $10,000 worth of cocaine and marijuana.

Castro was on probation for trafficking cocaine at the time he was charged.