First, when we thought about this as an issue....
We're very adept at tracking all the illicit drugs. We're very good at tracking the criminal element that's involved in that, but quite often we're cut short when all of a sudden the drug of choice in the community becomes a prescribed drug. It becomes very difficult for us to manage that from the investigative and enforcement perspective.
If you have a number of people in the community who have drugs, and they're trading among each other, you can't distinguish between one person's scrip for 20 Dilaudid pills and another's. You can't tell whether or not those have been exchanged, but quite often that is what happens. In the culture that these folks are in, someone can score some drugs from a physician and trade them to someone else.
When we talk about deaths in Nova Scotia—we've had roughly 400 in the past five years—that's what we're seeing, this cocktail of alcohol and drugs, some illicit and some licit, methadone, etc. That is what, unfortunately, people are succumbing to. From an investigative perspective, when we go to these scenes, it's very difficult to manage from a policing perspective, especially when you have the families asking what we can do from a policing perspective, as someone sold this person those drugs.
Certainly we're getting there. There have been some charges laid in relation to folks trafficking those drugs to people who have subsequently succumbed.