Creating Anxiety, Pain

Canadians are among the highest users of prescription opioids in the world. Second, of course, to the United States, but not a distant second. It isn't a record to be proud of. Why are we so dependent on them? Well the obvious answer is for pain control, and there's little doubt that a lot of people live with pain. Doctors treating them empathetically know how diminished their quality of life is, and make every effort to relieve that pain.

But there are many in the medical profession who see the epidemic of prescribing opioids as a problem in and of itself. Too readily prescribed, in too great a strength and for too prolonged a period with too little oversight. And there are those patients, without an institutionalized electronic medical-health erecord system in the country, who go from doctor to doctor for multiple prescriptions which they sell on the black market.

It's a convoluted, intractable problem. Hard for medical practitioners to keep check and control. And the result of that is that people use chemicals like OxyContin not for pain relief but for boredom relief, to get high, and they're unwilling to relinquish what they regard as important in their lives. Prescriptions for oxycodone (active chemical ingredient in OxyContin) are, if anything on the increase provincially.

An epidemic of hard drug use has incapacitated people to the extent that many remote Northern First Nations communities have declared an health emergency, appealing to the federal government to alleviate the problem. Easier said than done. What are the leaders of the Aboriginal communities themselves doing to foster a healthier community? These are remote reserves, which means they are remote from medical facilities focusing on the problem.

It is one thing, again, to demand solutions, another entirely to produce them. Despite the best of intentions, no one can insist that health professionals relocate to remote areas of the country to sacrifice their own practises, when health professionals are already in short supply in more populous areas of the country, in large urban centres.

It has been estimated that in the last 25 years over 100,000 people in North America have died as a result of prescription opioids, according to Dr. David Juurink, head of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre. "As a doctor, I don't want to see people suffering or in pain. But we simply are not using these drugs properly."

Ontario's Health Ministry claims that between 300 to 400 people die every year in the province from opioid-related overdoses. And the opioid most frequently isolated in resulting autopsies in recent years is oxycodone. In 2010, Canadian pharmacies filled over 17 million prescriptions for opioid analgesics, according to a prescription drug-research company, and almost ten percent of them were for OxyContin.

Ontario is preparing to restrict access to the drug. And those familiar with its use and its fallout are predicting mass incidents of withdrawal. "This is going to create anxiety, it's going to create panic in some cases. There are going to be huge delays and the only people to be harmed by it will be people in pain legitimately using the drug", warns Dr. Roman Jovey, past president of the Canadian Pain Society.