Experts call it Canada's hidden drug problem, one that kills more people than
heroin overdoses. The difference? Instead of scoring on the street, you can get
it with the flick of doctor's pen.
Deaths as a result of taking narcotic pain relievers, also known as opioids,
have nearly doubled in 14 years, says an Ontario-based study released yesterday.
In particular, deaths from oxycodone, a very potent narcotic pain killer, rose
fivefold between 1999 and 2004, immediately following the introduction of
OxyContin in Ontario, which is the only brand of long-acting oxycodone.
Most deaths occurred in individuals who were also taking sleeping pills or
alcohol, said researchers involved in the study published in the Canadian
Medical Association Journal.
"This is a prominent, very prevalent problem," said Benedikt Fischer, a public
health professor at Simon Fraser University. "It comes from an unexpected side,
namely medications we all think are just therapeutic and safe and wonderful
because we get them from the pharmacy and the doctor. But they obviously bear a
lot of risks."
Fischer, who contributed a commentary on the study in the CMAJ, said while data
is not available for the entire country, he suspects a surge in opioid-related
deaths can be found nationwide.
The study found that all opioid-related deaths, not just oxycodone, in Ontario
nearly doubled between 1991 and 2004, from about 14 people per million residents
in 1991 to 27 per million in 2004.
Prescriptions for oxycodone also soared 850 per cent between 1991 and 2007.
Other drugs that use some form of oxycodone include Percocet.
To put the problem into context, David Juurlink, a doctor from Sunnybrook Health
Sciences Centre in Toronto who worked on the study, said that while H1N1 has
killed a little over 100 people in Canada, in the last year of the study,
opioids were killing about 300 people in Ontario alone.
Source : The Montreal Gazette
