Saving People From Their Addictions

OxyContin: "Their chemical composition is such that the U.S. is just a few carbon molecules from being a nation of heroin addicts." Katherine Eban, Fortune

About 15,000 Americans in 2008 alone, died of opioid overdoses. The introduction of OxyContin in Canada brought a sudden rise of opioid-related deaths. On First Nations reserves in particular, majority percentages of the residents are addicted to OxyContin. It has become an epidemic. Causing tribal chiefs to call for federal intervention.

That intervention has come in the form of de-listing OxyContin from the Province of Ontario approved prescription drugs, along with OxyContin's successor formula. There is going to be an awful lot of convulsive pain, mass-produced, in the near future as the acquisition of OxyContin is restrained. But addicts always seem to find their way around restraints.

OxyContin has been prescribed in Ontario in high rates, far more than other provinces. Its pain-relieving qualities are not in question; its illegal use for its narcotic effects is. The growing death rates may be interpreted as a death wish, willing suicides. The same cannot be said for babies being born addicted. People are committing themselves to the use of the drug, and in so doing truncating their futures.

The rising death rates of young people in Alberta and British Columbia, for example, have been well publicized. Parents bereaved and disbelieving, speak of their attempts to dissuade their young adults from using the prescription drugs obtained through illegal means. Even those parents themselves involved in drug rehabilitation, exposing their own children to the wearying details, admit defeat.

"We have a culture of really dishing these drugs out", Benedikt Fisher, director of the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction at Simon Fraser University, commented.

An electronic records system that would identify addicts who go to multiple doctors for prescriptions could be useful for pharmacists dispensing the drug, to intervene in its acquisition. Addicts don't seem to be able to discern nor much care whether or not they are actively hastening their deaths by pursuing the use of the drug against all common sense.

"Over-prescribing and abuse of opioids - Oxycontin in particular - is a problem in Ontario that we take very seriously", said Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews when she announced the changes to take place, making it difficult for doctors to prescribe OxyContin and its successor-drug OxyNEO - available soon only under the Exceptional Access Program.

Other than users in the United States, Canadians make more use of OxyContin than any other country in the world. Purdue, the drug manufacturer, when it introduced the chemical drug, bruited about their conclusion that it was non-addictive as a result of its time-releasing technology.

Something that addicts found their way around readily enough by crushing the pills and snorting the dust for a heroin-like high. Even though Purdue paid $635-million in penalties for misbranding and misleading, they continue to make record profits over the sales of OxyContin.