Health committee  Thank you. I'd like to see the resources put towards stronger regulation of marketing and more effective monitoring of harms of prescription drug abuse, and also investigation of previous mismarketing and previous harms that could actually generate revenue for future investigat

Health committee  I would. Thank you for the opportunity. I think the short answer is billions of dollars in marketing. That is how the fact that opioids and other medications are addictive was overlooked through all of this. They are overlooked by physicians and overlooked by regulators, because

Health committee  Thank you for the question. My comments may not have been clear. I'm not aware of any countries where there are no interactions between the pharmaceutical industry and physicians. I made some statements about.... I was contrasting the pharmaceutical industry here in Canada with

Health committee  I think certain practices should be banned or severely restricted, and that could happen at the level of medical schools. For example, that's the way to help control what happens when medical students and residents are taught. You could also work with national bodies like the Can

Health committee  I completely agree and thank you for the question. We recently completed a study that demonstrated that Canadian medical journals, such as the Canadian Medical Association Journal, when compared with journals in the United Kingdom and the United States, such as the British Medica

Health committee  It's currently the Pharmaceutical Advertising Advisory Board that has to approve every ad that appears in a print medical journal. I have had discussions with them about ads that I had concerns about, ads that I thought were misleading and could potentially harm patients and in c

Health committee  They host satellite symposia at conferences. They also host hospital rounds or sponsor hospital rounds presentations, just like the session I attended in 2010. This would be an hour-long presentation, usually in the morning, at which physicians meet to discuss a particular clinic

Health committee  Thank you for the question. It's definitely not an anomaly. If you go to the annual conference of family physicians, you will meet with representatives of all of the pharmaceutical companies present in Canada. It's very common for continuing medical education events to be funded

Health committee  Thank you for the question. Yes, absolutely. As the president of Purdue pointed out, no formulation is completely resistant to tampering, and even the newest formulation, of course, can be altered so that it can be injected or nasally insufflated, nasally inhaled. But even aside

Health committee  I agree with all those suggestions and I'll just list a few more, if it pleases the committee. First, at the stage of approval of medications, there should be higher standards for new products being approved. I think that currently there are too many different drugs that could p

Health committee  I was talking about the marketing of the older product, OxyContin. I would like to say regarding the newer formulation that it's remarkable, given the history—that is, the history of Purdue Pharma illegally making the claim in the United States that its product, OxyContin, which

Health committee  Exactly. Added to those potential problems is the concern that the new medication would be prescribed to people who may not need to receive a prescription for opioids at all. Physicians might decide to write a prescription for OxyNEO, believing there is a reduced potential for a

Health committee  Thank you, and good morning. I'm a family doctor and researcher at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto and a lecturer in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of Toronto. Before I begin my remarks, I would like to register my support for the suggestion