Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Being a pharmacist for the past 20 years in the Territories has allowed me the ability to see changes in prescriber behaviour and people’s view on prescription drugs, especially narcotics.
Admittedly, I would have to say our prescribers are doing an incredible job to make sure we aren’t over-prescribing for hard narcotics, pain management and therapies. That said, there are always those patients that slip through the cracks and find the means to double doctor, or what we refer to as polypharmacy, for acquiring their drug of choice. Obviously the new WOLF prescriber system has taken care of a lot of this potential abuse and the pharmacy community supports any continued enhancements to this system.
However, I don’t want to give the impression that everything is okay out there, as we do suffer like any other jurisdiction in Canada. Prescription drugs like OxyContin, Percocet, and Tylenol 3s are by far the most prevalent narcotic prescribed for pain management in the Territories. In fact, I want to point out that OxyContin is being phased out of Canada as we speak and a new tamper-resistant formulation of OxyContin called OxyNEO is available and being developed in an effort to prevent individuals seeking OxyContin’s euphoric effects for unintended use. This will have huge impacts affecting prescribed opiate abuse.
Regardless of which narcotics are used and sometimes abused are what most health care stakeholders come across when the topic of abuse or prescribed addiction come into play. We are not quite yet at an epidemic state for opiate or narcotic abuse, but this is more from an observational point of view. You see, we have no way to know this information as there are no stats on opiate addiction as such for any community in the NWT. The most recent NWT addictions report published in 2010 provides information for alcohol, illicit drug use, tobacco use and gambling, yet nothing on prescription narcotics.
In any event, it is important that as a government we must be armed with the right information affecting our people. We can all agree that abuse and addiction take on many forms under many different situations, and in order for us to understand the issue of addiction and treat it, we need to know where to start. Emerging drug addictions have to start with gathering of information, and without the proper statistics on prescription narcotic abuse we will never know its true destructive impact on the lives of the people of the Northwest Territories.
I will have questions later today for the Minister of Health on getting assurances that prescription narcotic drug abuse be included in all future NWT addiction reporting and information sharing.
Thank you, Mr. Dolynny. The honourable Member for Hay River North, Mr. Bouchard.
