Remember back when Ontario rolled out an online narcotics-prescription database – one meant to track exactly who is prescribing what to whom? The idea is to prevent “double-doctoring” and ensuring that doctors, pharmacists and Health Ministry officials ensure that people who need drugs are getting them.
The database was in testing phase as of November, 2011 and was supposed to be operational early this year. But the people prescribing the drugs still can’t access it. That means they have no idea what other drugs a potential patient could be taking, or was taking. In some cases, it means patients can’t get the drugs they need.
Toronto doctor Irfan Dhalla said doctors still have no idea when they’re going to get in on this database – but they’d really, really like to.
Photo by John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail
Thursday, April 12, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
TORONTO – The battle over whether to give addicts a safe place to inject has moved to Ontario from the West Coast.
When the Supreme Court of Canada handed Vancouver’s supervised injection site a legal victory late last year by denying the federal government’s attempt to shutter it, many observers expected the ruling to give rise to similar sites across Canada.
Not so fast.
Karen Reeves, who was diagnosed with epilepsy 11 years ago, is photographed at her home in Waterloo, Ont. Thursday, March 29, 2012. Reeves has struggled to get epilepsy drugs and is now forced to travel to Florida every 3 months to fill her prescription.
Photo by Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Wednesday, April 11, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY and KIM MACKRAEL
When the only drug that effectively stopped Karen Reeves’s seizures became unavailable in Canada, she didn’t find out until her pharmacist couldn’t fill her prescription – the medication wasn’t there. Replacement shipments never showed up.
Welcome to the new normal of prescription drug supplies.
Photo by Michelle Siu for the Globe and Mail
Tuesday, March 6, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
A Northern Ontario coroner says the province’s doctors and pharmacists need to take extra care in switching patients from OxyContin to other opioids, following the death of a man whose doctor changed his prescription and gave him an incorrect dose.
Photo by Michelle Siu for the Globe and Mail
Tuesday, February 21, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Nova Scotia has become the latest province to clamp down on OxyContin prescriptions, with Health Minister Maureen MacDonald announcing the province will only pay for the potent painkiller’s replacement in extenuating circumstances – for cancer-related pain or palliative care.
Nova Scotia’s move comes days after Ontario, with the highest rates of prescription-opioid addiction in the country, announced it is tightening rules for the painkiller.
Physicians called the move a step forward, but warned that changing publicly funded drug plans won’t be nearly enough to stem abuse from the prescription drug.
“There is a lot more that needs to be done,” said David Juurlink, a drug-safety specialist at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. “These drugs should be harder to obtain, harder to prescribe – and certainly at high doses.”
Photo by Michelle Siu for the Globe and Mail
Saturday, February 18, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
The epicentres of Canada’s prescription pill problem have said they’ll only pay for the leading brand of potent painkillers under special circumstances – one of the most dramatic steps taken in years to tackle the country’s fastest-growing addiction.
Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which manufactures OxyContin, is replacing it with a drug that’s supposed to be less prone to abuse. But some provinces have decided that’s not good enough.
Laura holds Carter at their home in Hamilton, ON. He was born with the shakes, the sweats, stiff limbs and sneezing fits, hospitalized and on morphine for three weeks. He's now home, and healthy.
Photo by Glenn Lowson for the Globe and Mail
Saturday, January 7, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
HAMILTON – Hours after his birth, stiff-limbed and trembling, Carter was whisked away to a bassinet in a neonatal intensive care unit and fed morphine through a dropper.
He broke out in sweats, a fine sheen clinging to his neck and scalp, when, weeks later, nurses started to wean him off. His mother, Laura, who asked to be identified by her first name only, knew exactly what he was going through: She’d experienced withdrawal before.
“That was the worst part. Knowing what it feels like, and knowing a little baby … it’s the worst feeling in the world, you know? You don’t want your child to go through that.”
Toby Talbot/The Associated Press
Friday, August 12, 2011 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Starting in November, the Ontario government will have the ability to collect information on who’s prescribing how many pills to whom, and where those prescriptions are getting filled.
Regulations attached to the province’s planned prescription database, which has been in the works for months, passed cabinet Wednesday. That means that this fall in theory – and this winter in practice, because that’s when the database will be fully functional – the province can start tracking prescriptions and, eventually, clamp down on what Health Minister Deb Matthews calls an urgent problem with over-prescribed narcotics.
"I would characterize it as the most important drug safety problem we face today," says Dave Juurlink, a doctor at Toronto's Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and a member of the province's Committee to Evaluate Drugs. "I don't know what it is about this particular problem that has allowed it to escape the scrutiny that so many other drug-related problems have attracted."
Photo by Michelle Siu for the Globe and Mail
Wednesday, July 13, 2011 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
The Ontario government and the College of Physicians and Surgeons have nothing against four dozen recommendations resulting from an inquest into a pair of overdose deaths – but they have no intention of acting on them any time soon.
The suggestions from a five-member jury came out last week following more than a month of testimony into the 2008 deaths of Dustin King and Donna Bertrand. The two died within days of each other in Ms. Bertrand’s Brockville, Ont., apartment. Each had ingested fatal amounts of prescription drugs.
Photo by Michelle Siu for the Globe and Mail
KIM MACKRAEL AND ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Tuesday, July 05, 2011 – Globe and Mail
Ontario should overhaul its system for prescribing, monitoring and treating patients using prescription opioids, an inquest into two fatal drug overdoses in Brockville has recommended.
The inquest into the 2008 deaths of 41-year-old Donna Bertrand and 19-year-old Dustin King delivered 48 wide-ranging recommendations Tuesday, including mandatory education and auditing of doctors and better systems for monitoring who can access pills.
Mr. King and Ms. Bertrand were found dead in the same apartment within days of each other. He died Nov. 21, 2008, of an OxyContin overdose, passed out on Ms. Bertrand’s couch, where he lay for hours before people in the downtown Brockville apartment noticed something was wrong.
She died 11 days later after ingesting a fatal mix of sedatives and antidepressants.
