July 25, 2014 – Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News
Health Canada wants ideas on how to stop risky prescribing of the drugs fuelling Canada’s fastest-growing addictions.
Health Canada looking for ways to make opioid prescribing safer
prescription drugs
‘This is about keeping people’s feet to the fire’: Report tackles prescription drug abuse
Rebecca Lindell and Anna Mehler Paperny, Global News
This isn’t the first slew of suggestions on how to tackle Canada’s “crisis” in prescription opioid misuse. But many hope it’ll be the last.
A report released Wednesday by the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse culminates a year-long mind-meld of people representing almost every group in the country with a stake in stopping painkillers from creating addicts, drug dealers and deaths.
Who pops the most painkillers? How Canada’s opioid use compares with the rest of the world
Click to compare Canada’s hydromorph contin consumption with the rest of the world.
Used to be that America could easily claim the title of world opioid capital. But when it comes to the most powerful prescription drugs, Canada is now ahead – in part because of higher hydromorphone use.
Ontario urges feds not to allow generic OxyContin onto market
Michelle Siu for the Globe and Mail
Saturday, July 7, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
Ontario is “strongly urging” the federal government not to let generic brands of the popular painkiller OxyContin into Canada once Purdue Pharmaceuticals’ patent runs out this fall.
The expiration of Purdue’s OxyContin patent on Nov. 25 opens the door for other companies to manufacture cheaper generic versions of the controlled-release oxycodone. Purdue will continue to make a new, tamper-resistant patented drug – OxyNEO – introduced to replace OxyContin earlier this year.
How chronic drug shortages became Canada’s new normal
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.
Treating the tiny victims of Canada’s fastest-growing addiction
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.”
Brockville inquest urges overhaul of opioid prescribing
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.
Inquest into Brockville’s fatal overdoses lays bare the toll of prescription-drug addiction
Hilda Bertrand stands outside the Brockville train station on Monday, June 27, 2011. Her daughter, Donna Bertrand, died of an overdose Dec. 2, 2008 -- days after 19-year-old Dustin King died of an OxyContin overdose in her apartment. An inquest into their deaths was ongoing June 2011 and heard closing arguments Wednesday, June 29, 2011.
(Photo by Anna Mehler Paperny/The Globe and Mail)
Saturday, July 2, 2011 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
BROCKVILLE, ONT. — Day after day for weeks on end, Hilda Bertrand and Brenda Toupin-Wiles sat in a Brockville, Ont., courtroom and listened to strangers dissect their children’s deaths.
The inquest into the fatal 2008 overdoses of Ms. Bertrand’s 41-year-old daughter and Ms. Toupin-Wiles’s 19-year-old son has given both families a crash course in pharmacology and prescription-drug abuse.
“It’s been educational. And disturbing,” Ms. Toupin-Wiles said. “I’ve been educated on how to crush, smoke, snort, inject every kind of drug you can imagine.”
Overdose inquest: Brockville deaths put focus on prescription-drug abuse
Dustin King was 19 when he died after snorting half an 80-milligram OxyContin tablet in Donna Bertrand's apartment. Ms. Bertrand, 41, died of an overdose in the same apartment days later.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
She was a 48-year-old mother and former nurse, receiving disability payments for back pain.
He was a fearless 19-year-old known for befriending everyone, who bounced from high school to temp jobs, from one couch to another when he and his dad argued.
They died days apart, in the same apartment, overdosed on drugs.
She had prescriptions – for the OxyContin toxicologists say caused his death, and the cocktail of antidepressants and sedatives they say precipitated hers.
He did not.
An inquest starting in Brockville this week into the 2008 deaths of Donna Bertrand and Dustin King will try to piece together not how they died so much as how to prevent deaths like theirs.
Ontario cracking down on prescription pill abuse
Friday, November 20, 2009 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY
In the face of Canada’s growing pill problem, Ontario is moving to change the way opioids are prescribed and monitored.
New regulations to be put in place in the coming months would crack down on prescription abuse and set new benchmarks for how these pills should be doled out in an attempt to deal with the growing numbers of people getting hooked on painkillers across the country.
Addiction experts say the changes are badly needed and should have come a decade ago.
a business of misfits 