Pharmacy regulators say their battle against the national epidemic of prescriptionnarcotic abuse is being needlessly thwarted by an unlikely obstacle: Health Canada and its refusal to hand over key wholesale drug data for privacy reasons.
The federal department oversees pharmaceutical manufacturers and wholesalers and requires them to regularly submit figures on their sales to pharmacies. Pharmacy regulators say they need that information to crosscheck the drugstores' own records, and help determine how large volumes of such drugs as OxyContin and Percocet are winding up on the street.
Health Canada says it cannot hand over the sales information for individual drugstores because of federal privacy legislation, an interpretation of the law some pharmacy bodies are questioning.
"It's an utter frustration," said Don Rowe, registrar of the Newfoundland & Labrador Pharmacy Board. "It's pretty frustrating when you can't get information from the national body that has that information. There's times where we wonder, 'Do they really care what's happening here?' "
Regulators say they do not want a confrontation with Health Canada, only increased co-operation to help curb what some experts call a prescription-drug-abuse "crisis." They raised the issue at a meeting between the regulators' national umbrella association and Health Canada in June.
Health Canada collects sales information from wholesalers and manufacturers as part of its inspections of the companies but is limited by the Privacy Act in what it can reveal to the regulators, Olivia Caron, a department spokeswoman, said in an emailed response to questions. It can divulge some data where an individual pharmacist - not a pharmacy - has been found guilty of breaking the law or professional rules, she said. But the department will consider the pharmacy boards' complaints when it reviews the regulations, she said.
"Health Canada has taken note of this concern."
Though it is unclear how many Canadians abuse potent prescription painkillers, evidence points to its being rampant.
Canada is one of the world's highest users of legal opioids (opium-like drugs for treating pain) and a national study published in 2008 concluded prescription medications had taken over heroin as the opioid of choice on the street. In Ontario, the number of deaths linked to oxycodone, the active ingredient in the slow-release OxyContin tablets, soared more than 2.5-fold to 119 in 2002-06.
"This is a huge publichealth issue," said Benedikt Fischer, a professor at Simon Fraser University and leading expert in the field.
"It's exploding, but we're only just slowly wrapping our heads around the extent of this and what it all means ... We need a huge intervention strategy."
It has long been known illegal street use of such drugs is fed in part by people who obtain prescriptions, sometimes from multiple doctors, and use the pills to feed their own addiction or sell to others.
Experts say there is also evidence, though, drugs are being stolen, lost, purloined by employees or otherwise "diverted" from higher up in the supply chain. A police wiretap in Toronto caught a pharmaceutical company employee talking about selling a million Percocet-type pills to an organized-crime figure.
Last Wednesday, a pharma-cist in St. John's, accused of illegally peddling oxycodone and other prescription drugs, pleaded guilty to several charges.
A 2005 U.S. study found theft or loss of at least 28 million doses of various opioid painkillers had been reported to the government over a fouryear period, 89% of it going missing from pharmacies.
How the underground opioid system works in Canada is still largely a question mark, however.
"We know there is a big problem out there but we need to better understand it in order to effectively address it," said Greg Eberhart, registrar of the Alberta College of Pharmacy. "It seems inappropriate that we all have a regulatory responsibility within different parts of the system, but those different parts aren't com-municating effectively with one another."
Regulators say the data on sales from wholesalers to pharmacies are important because they would enable them to compare what was supplied to a local pharmacist to what the druggist legally dispensed. Any gap between those numbers could indicate drugs being diverted for illicit use.
Some wholesalers will voluntarily hand over the information to pharmacy colleges, but more often than not they refer requests to Health Canada, where the regulators run into a "blank wall," said Mr. Rowe. Sometimes, the result is a lengthy legal process to get the wholesaler to divulge their sales data, he said, making investigations months longer than necessary.
Origin
Source: National Post
The federal department oversees pharmaceutical manufacturers and wholesalers and requires them to regularly submit figures on their sales to pharmacies. Pharmacy regulators say they need that information to crosscheck the drugstores' own records, and help determine how large volumes of such drugs as OxyContin and Percocet are winding up on the street.
Health Canada says it cannot hand over the sales information for individual drugstores because of federal privacy legislation, an interpretation of the law some pharmacy bodies are questioning.
"It's an utter frustration," said Don Rowe, registrar of the Newfoundland & Labrador Pharmacy Board. "It's pretty frustrating when you can't get information from the national body that has that information. There's times where we wonder, 'Do they really care what's happening here?' "
Regulators say they do not want a confrontation with Health Canada, only increased co-operation to help curb what some experts call a prescription-drug-abuse "crisis." They raised the issue at a meeting between the regulators' national umbrella association and Health Canada in June.
Health Canada collects sales information from wholesalers and manufacturers as part of its inspections of the companies but is limited by the Privacy Act in what it can reveal to the regulators, Olivia Caron, a department spokeswoman, said in an emailed response to questions. It can divulge some data where an individual pharmacist - not a pharmacy - has been found guilty of breaking the law or professional rules, she said. But the department will consider the pharmacy boards' complaints when it reviews the regulations, she said.
"Health Canada has taken note of this concern."
Though it is unclear how many Canadians abuse potent prescription painkillers, evidence points to its being rampant.
Canada is one of the world's highest users of legal opioids (opium-like drugs for treating pain) and a national study published in 2008 concluded prescription medications had taken over heroin as the opioid of choice on the street. In Ontario, the number of deaths linked to oxycodone, the active ingredient in the slow-release OxyContin tablets, soared more than 2.5-fold to 119 in 2002-06.
"This is a huge publichealth issue," said Benedikt Fischer, a professor at Simon Fraser University and leading expert in the field.
"It's exploding, but we're only just slowly wrapping our heads around the extent of this and what it all means ... We need a huge intervention strategy."
It has long been known illegal street use of such drugs is fed in part by people who obtain prescriptions, sometimes from multiple doctors, and use the pills to feed their own addiction or sell to others.
Experts say there is also evidence, though, drugs are being stolen, lost, purloined by employees or otherwise "diverted" from higher up in the supply chain. A police wiretap in Toronto caught a pharmaceutical company employee talking about selling a million Percocet-type pills to an organized-crime figure.
Last Wednesday, a pharma-cist in St. John's, accused of illegally peddling oxycodone and other prescription drugs, pleaded guilty to several charges.
A 2005 U.S. study found theft or loss of at least 28 million doses of various opioid painkillers had been reported to the government over a fouryear period, 89% of it going missing from pharmacies.
How the underground opioid system works in Canada is still largely a question mark, however.
"We know there is a big problem out there but we need to better understand it in order to effectively address it," said Greg Eberhart, registrar of the Alberta College of Pharmacy. "It seems inappropriate that we all have a regulatory responsibility within different parts of the system, but those different parts aren't com-municating effectively with one another."
Regulators say the data on sales from wholesalers to pharmacies are important because they would enable them to compare what was supplied to a local pharmacist to what the druggist legally dispensed. Any gap between those numbers could indicate drugs being diverted for illicit use.
Some wholesalers will voluntarily hand over the information to pharmacy colleges, but more often than not they refer requests to Health Canada, where the regulators run into a "blank wall," said Mr. Rowe. Sometimes, the result is a lengthy legal process to get the wholesaler to divulge their sales data, he said, making investigations months longer than necessary.
Origin
Source: National Post
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