Drug dealer gets 15 years after shipping meth to New Zealand via YVR

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A Montreal father of two was called a “parasite” and jailed 15 years for a foiled attempt to ship 7.5 kilograms of methamphetamine in heat-sealed vials disguised as health supplements to New Zealand through Vancouver airport and other drug and firearm charges, a B.C. Supreme Court judge has ruled.

Kien Trung Pham, 48, who lived in Nanaimo beginning when he was 16 and now lives in Montreal, had been found guilty in November for trafficking the meth in four different shipments he had sent by courier and plane from a Nanaimo apartment he rented but didn’t live in, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Robin Baird said in his reasons for judgment delivered in a Nanaimo courtroom this month.

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He was also found guilty of possession for the purpose of trafficking smaller amounts of fentanyl and cocaine and possessing unlicensed firearms.

“Pham was the boss of a sophisticated mid- to upper-level trafficking business as a “pure profiteer, let it be emphasized, not an addict himself, not involved in this pernicious trade to support his own habit, but a parasite enriching himself by the immiseration and destruction of others,” Baird wrote.

He said Pham had two previous drug convictions and the main sentencing principles are denunciation, deterrence and separation from society with rehabilitation a “distant secondary concern.”

He noted Pham in his pre-sentence interview “refused to discuss the charges, expressed no insight into the harm he has inflicted on drug users or the community and has taken no responsibility for his criminal misconduct.”

Pham had shipped the first packages of drugs under cover of a fictitious company called Essential Nutrition Wholesale on May 7, 2019. The drugs were packaged in containers purporting to be muscle and tissue supplements and were “crudely sealed with dodgy-looking aftermarket foam caps,” he wrote in the reasons of judgment in which Pham was found guilty.

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Canada Border and Services Agency staff in Vancouver seized the shipments and police lifted Pham’s fingerprint from one of the containers, he wrote. They told the Nanaimo courier staff what was going and asked them to call if Pham’s co-accused showed up with another package, Baird said.

Courier staff set aside two other shipments that police seized and searched and found drugs within. Police on May 23, 2019, followed Pham and the co-accused to the courier company and seized and searched the package they dropped off before pulling them over, court was told.

“On the totality of the evidence, I find beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Pham was intimately involved in the shipment of each of the five packages seized by the CBSA and the RCMP,” Baird said in finding him guilty.

Fentanyl, cocaine and firearms were found in his rental apartment, he said.

At sentencing, Baird said Pham provided his customers with drugs that could harm or kill them, exposed other tenants in his rental building to risk of harm from “incidental contact with highly toxic substances” and to the risk of violence if they or innocent members of the public “might have been caught in violent crossfire.” And he exposed the people handling the drug packages to “toxic contamination and ill health,” he wrote.

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Pham, who immigrated to Canada from Vietnam with his family in 1992, is a permanent resident and his conviction could result in him being deported, court heard.

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