Yes. Thank you very much for the question.
Madam Chair, as the minister mentioned, the issue of prescription drug abuse is one for which there's a heightened awareness of its challenge for communities, including but certainly not limited to first nations communities.
Because we run the non-insured health benefits program, which provides financial assistance for first nations to access the drugs, the needed medications on our formulary program, we've been doing a number of things to try to find the balance, which I think all jurisdictions are trying to do, in order to make sure that needed pain medication is available but that we are putting appropriate checks and balances in place.
The kinds of checks and balances we've done in conjunction with our expert advisory committee include our working with them to understand what is appropriate. We have, for example, daily or monthly limits, so that there is some sense of how much pain medication of a certain type is appropriate. There are in some cases circumstances in which we will have flags that go up for the pharmacist, and therefore they can't fill the prescription until there's a check.
Particularly with regard to OxyContin, we've put it on what is called exception drug status. That means it's not on an open formulary basis; you have to have the approval of the program very specifically. That's the mechanism that we see has significantly impacted the use of OxyContin.