B.C. is a funny place in many good ways. They're so progressive in a lot of ways in terms of making sure that treatment is available. In B.C. you have a situation where Suboxone can be prescribed, providing the doctor has entered into what's called a collaborative prescribing agreement with the provincial Ministry of Health, but there are requirements as well for methadone exemptions.
I can tell you that 50% of the physicians I've met will say they don't want family doctors prescribing Suboxone, and then 50% of addiction specialists will say they don't mind family doctors prescribing Suboxone, and let the specialists handle the more challenging cases.
There's a bit of a hodgepodge in terms of what's going on nationwide on the price. When you look at the price compared to methadone—I'm going to pull a number out of the air—methadone is literally pennies. What they don't factor in when they look at methadone is.... There was a study done by Neil McKeganey, which I'm happy to provide to the committee, that looked at the social cost associated with the use of methadone. They found that over time, in comparison to Suboxone, the methadone costs were very high. That was actually proved by a paper that just came out from CADTH, Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health, that said in the long term, cost-effectiveness of Suboxone, even though the price point is a little bit more expensive, is much better.
Last, regarding the formulation piece that you touched on, yes, it is true that we did apply to the FDA to remove the tablet formulation. We've gone to the film. It's the same with Australia. The reason, though, is that in the United States there was no requirement by the FDA to have child-resistant or even tamper-resistant packages. In Canada you get the foil packs. In the United States, it was literally a bottle of 30 tablets that could be opened by children. We went to the FDA and said we were withdrawing it, and we thought that everybody should, or at the very least, that they should make sure that it's child-resistant.