Documents leaked last week from the Ministry of Health - but confirmed to be real by Health Minister Josie Osborne - detail that a significant portion of the opioids being freely prescribed by doctors and pharmacists are not being consumed by their intended recipients.
Critic for Mental Health and Addictions and Skeena MLA Claire Rattée says this is a problem.
“The government doesn’t seem to be willing to take responsibility for the fact that a lot of the safe supply has been diverted to criminals. It’s been diverted to children. There’s been a lot of issues around that. And the government has not really taken... Owned up for it, I should say rather. And so I’m looking forward to when we’re actually sitting to be able to try and hold them to account on that and get some answers.”
Rattée is also calling for a change in the way overdose deaths are being recorded.
“The B.C. Coroner’s report had come out recently, and it showed that there was a bit of a decline in overdose deaths, which I was really happy to see. I assumed that it had something to do with the timing of how they tried that failed policy of decriminalization and then kind of walked it back. So I assume that had something to do with it. And, upon digging a little bit deeper, I found out that they have re categorized fatalities that are due to safe supply. So those aren’t categorized as an unregulated drug death anymore. They’re calculated as a prescription drug death. And that is not something that is publicly available information. So I’m trying to dig into that right now to figure out why those statistics were skewed in that way just to, to see if that does have any bearing on the overall numbers.”
CFTK-TV did reach out to MLA Amna Shah, Parliamentary Secretary for Mental Health and Addictions for comment, but did not hear back before deadline.
Rattée maintains that an overdose is an overdose.
“In my opinion, if somebody is overdosing on safe supply or street supply, it shouldn’t really matter. At the end of the day, drugs are drugs. I don’t like the term toxic drug supply because all drugs are toxic. And so I don’t think that there should be distinction between the two. I think regardless, that is an overdose death.”
[with files from Robert Pictou]