The Canadian Press - ONLINE EDITION
Ontario to track overuse of OxyContin and other prescriptions drugs
TORONTO - Ontario's governing Liberals are moving ahead with new restrictions on the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin and other prescription narcotics.
Health Minister Deb Matthews will be in London today to announce long-overdue changes aimed at curbing the abuse of certain prescription drugs.
A source said the government will be looking at better ways to track the overuse of prescriptions, but wouldn't provide any other details.
Last year, a top health bureaucrat spoke about creating a province-wide tracking system to monitor how much OxyContin is going out.
The system would then send out an alert if someone tried to fill a prescription for the same drug two days in a row.
The tracking system would expand on an existing online system for drugs prescribed under a provincial program that funds medications for seniors, welfare recipients and the disabled.
Matthews has often spoken about how the abuse of OxyContin is a serious and urgent problem that's destroying lives across the province.
One of the big concerns is that public dollars are being used to pay for the pills, which are getting out on the streets and fuelling life-destroying addictions.
Some of the other changes the government has mused about making include new guidelines on doctors and pharmacists to cap the number of pills that can be dispensed at one time.
Bureaucrats in the Health Ministry have for some time been looking at new measures to curtail the abuse of OxyContin _ dubbed "hillbilly heroin" by some _ and other opioid pain pills.
Former assistant deputy minister Helen Stevenson spoke about the measures last November, saying there's no question that public dollars are being abused.
In once case, 2,000 OxyContin pills were dispensed to a single patient under the provincial program.
Those who are trying to get their hands on large quantities of the drug often game the system by getting a prescription through the public drug plan one day, and a private plan the next, Stevenson said.
The ministry formed a narcotics advisory panel in April 2009, which heard from a number of groups across the province, including First Nations communities, parents who've lost their children to drugs, and private drug plan administrators who say they're seeing the same abuse.
Experts say OxyContin is particularly addictive due to its design.
It comes in high-strength doses where 35 per cent of the drug hits you right away. It's slow-release mechanism can also be overridden by simply crushing the pill.
People taking the drug are also vulnerable to addiction because they're in physical or psychological pain, experts say.
One study on drug use among Ontario students found that one in five teenage girls admitted to using an opioid painkiller without a prescription, with many users getting the drugs from home.
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