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Here's a story that perfectly sums up modern Canada. These are the titles of some Facebook Marketplace listings from Edmonton: 

"Pure Feem." 

"Feem/Afeem."

"No mixing."

If you're wondering what "afeem" is, it's another name for opium, the derivative of the opium poppy used to make morphine, heroin and other opioids. The photos even show mature opium poppy seed pods.

These listings are sitting on Facebook Marketplace for hundreds of dollars. Now, maybe the seller has some innocent explanation. Maybe they're selling dried ornamental pods. It's impossible to know their intent from screenshots alone.

But if someone put up a Marketplace listing advertising "pure cocaine" for $350, do you think it would stay online for very long? Of course not. Yet here we are with listings advertising "pure afeem" and "no mixing."

Meanwhile, the authorities are increasingly concerned about policing speech — tweets, Facebook posts, memes, jokes, or opinions that might hurt somebody's feelings.

It's amazing how quickly governments can mobilize when someone uses the wrong pronoun, posts an offensive joke online, or calls for non-citizen online "feem" peddlers to be deported. 

But an apparent listing for an opium product? That somehow slips through the cracks.

What a bizarre hierarchy of priorities. Actual drugs? Maybe later. Wrongthink? Emergency response, and a snitch line. 

Edmonton, like so many Canadian cities, has been ravaged by addiction. Every politician tells us the overdose crisis is the defining public health emergency of our time.

But where are the people who tell us they're protecting the community when social media platforms appear to host listings using terminology associated with opium products?

Funny how those censorship systems seem incredibly effective when the target is political speech, but not so much when it's something that appears to involve drugs.

Facebook can detect copyrighted music in a video within seconds, flag posts for "misinformation," suspend accounts over a spicy meme, and yet can't figure out why someone is selling something called "pure afeem" with photos of opium poppy pods? Come on.

Either the platform isn't paying attention, or it doesn't care enough to enforce its own rules consistently. Neither answer is particularly reassuring.

This is a symptom of a country that has lost sight of what public safety actually means: protecting communities from crime, addiction, violence and exploitation, not protecting adults from opinions.

In today's Canada, saying the wrong thing often attracts more official attention than selling the wrong thing. And that should concern every one of us.