Doctors urged to check drug histories to avoid overdoses

Helen Jennens flips through two sets of documents — one for each son who fatally overdosed.

Letters she sent in both cases to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia alleging the careless prescribing of potentially dangerous medications are neatly organized among responses from doctors.

Jennens says the deaths of her sons, Rian Leinweber in August 2011 and Tyler Leinweber in January 2016, could have been prevented if doctors had checked their drug histories on B.C.’s unique real-time database PharmaNet.

The provincewide network links pharmacies and hospitals to a central database that stores information on all dispensed prescriptions.

The system is also available to physicians, but doctors say most do not use it.

Jennens, who lives in Kelowna, has asked the college to make use of PharmaNet mandatory for all doctors so the files of high-risk or drug-seeking patients are flagged.

“Both boys, I have no idea how they lived as long as they did, with the medications they were prescribed, the combinations they were prescribed,” Jennens says through tears.

Rian was 37 when he died, three years after a truck collided with his motorcycle, crushing his right leg from hip to toe, requiring multiple surgeries.

Jennens went to Rian’s home with a pot of chili and found him propped up on his bed with his computer on his lap.

He’d stopped breathing from a combined overdose after being prescribed benzodiazepines, various drugs for insomnia and depression, and opioids for chronic pain while he awaited a second hip replacement.

Jennens says she’d warned doctors Rian could become hooked on opioids because he’d endured a decade of addiction that included cocaine and crystal meth.

“He was eight years drug free when he got into that accident. I said, ‘We know legitimately he needs stuff for pain because his leg was shattered but we also have to stay on top of it.’”

After Rian died, Jennens requested his PharmaNet records and questioned why he was prescribed such a wide range of medications including opioids.

“Why didn’t these people say enough? That was my whole issue with PharmaNet,” Jennens says. “It lets you know somebody’s got a drug history. He’s on this cocktail for three years and nobody is concerned about what may happen in terms of overdose?”

A big part of Jennens’s complaint with the College of Physicians and Surgeons focuses on mandating the use of PharmaNet, which she says could be optimized to protect patients.

“That didn’t happen, and five years later, my second son died,” she says of Tyler, who had ruptured his left Achilles tendon in 2008 while playing football and was prescribed OxyContin.

He became addicted to heroin and unknowingly took what turned out be fentanyl in his ex-wife’s bathroom, where he was found dead on the floor.

Armed with 173 pages of PharmaNet records listing Tyler’s medications, Jennens filed a second complaint and “pleaded” with the college to make the use of PharmaNet compulsory for all doctors.