Fix oversight of drug dealing
Someone is asleep at the switch.
What else could account for the fact that Ontario’s computerized oversight and tracking system for opioid dispensing has not caught a single drug-dealing pharmacist in the past five years, even though there are clear signs they are out there?
Indeed, as a joint investigation by the Toronto Star, Global News and the Ryerson School of Journalism found, a small number of these health-care professionals are cashing in on the lucrative black market trade in these deadly and highly addictive drugs.
But no one has sounded the alarm — despite a startling growth in the reporting of drug losses at pharmacies. In the past five years they have gone up dramatically, from about 2,200 in 2013 to 30,000 last year.
Nor did anyone seem to notice the fact that three-quarters of those losses were for “unexplained” reasons, or that the vast majority of those losses were for dangerous opioids such as hydromorphone, which is five times more potent than morphine.
Instead, the nine opioid-dealing pharmacists who have been disciplined by the Ontario College of Pharmacists in the past five years for putting more than 8,000 fentanyl patches — 32,000 potentially lethal doses — onto the street were discovered through either bad luck or good policing.
This failure on the government’s part to ensure that pain killers don’t find their way onto the black market is all the more concerning in the face of an opioid crisis that killed 1,265 people in the province last year.
Health Minister Christine Elliott didn’t create this problem. She inherited it. But she has not offered a plan to make the monitoring system more effective, or even agreed to discuss the issue.
Instead, in a statement issued by her spokesperson, she said: “Our government takes patient safety very seriously. The inappropriate use, abuse and diversion of prescription narcotics and controlled substances are very serious public health concerns.”
No kidding. But this statement of the obvious does not address the question: how does the government plan to make sure there is effective monitoring of pharmacists?
At present, drug-dealing pharmacists are caught more through dumb luck than as a result of active oversight.
Pharmacist Waseem Shaheen, for example, actually faked a robbery to cover up an illicit drug-dealing operation in Ottawa. He might have succeeded — police were convinced he was credible — but for the fact his assistants alerted investigating police to large fentanyl shipments.
Woodstock pharmacist Yogesh Patel forged prescriptions for dead people. The practice was uncovered only when he unwittingly walked, with a bagful of drugs, into a police surveillance operation of another man.
Neither of these men’s activities was discovered through the oversight that is supposed to be carried out by the provincial government.
Contrast that to the way the province monitors physicians.
Two years ago, the Health Department passed on the names of 86 doctors to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario who had been flagged by the computerized narcotics monitoring system for their “unusual” prescribing patterns of painkillers.
“We’re talking about daily doses of opioids that are equivalent to roughly 150 Tylenol 3s being consumed in a single day,” former health minister Eric Hoskins said at the time.
(So far, one of those doctors, Robert Stewart Cameron, admitted to professional misconduct at a formal discipline hearing and agreed to give up his licence.)
Those prescribing practises certainly raised alarms. Yet no such alarms went off when Shaheen and Patel trafficked thousands of fentanyl patches. Something is terribly wrong. This wrong-doing should have been caught under Hoskin’s watch, but it’s Elliott’s responsibility now. She must quickly ensure that the monitoring system works. Catching drug-dealing pharmacists should not depend on luck.
Health Minister Christine Elliott has not offered a plan to make the monitoring system more effective, or even agreed to discuss the issue