I'm going to say that I live on the north shore of Vancouver, which is a middle- to upper-class area, and my impression from speaking to family doctors in that area is that there is a problem. I've had family doctors tell me that women, especially, will order their medication online. It will come over from the States, and that's not picked up on. They will pop it at parties, whether it's oxycodone or a benzodiazepine such as Valium, and they'll have it along with their glass of wine and “off we go”. However, what I am more concerned about, to be honest, is the pervasive use of sedative-hypnotic medications, which I find more damaging or more difficult to deal with in women, for whatever reason. That's not a statistical thing. That's my personal observation.
Women, as you know, cope with stress at both ends—at home and at work, with the kids, etc. They do the double shift and they have to find ever-increasing ways of coping. We don't support, as a system, the other means of coping that we know are healthier, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, etc. We don't have the time to do that in our society and that's why people turn to these medications. They don't perceive them as problematic. Yet they are hugely problematic as we've talked about. Whitney Houston and all of these people used benzodiazepines daily in their lives.
I'm sorry—I forget the rest of what you were talking about. I just get so upset about this.
But the other thing I wanted to say is that you heard from other speakers earlier on that there is a huge problem with opiates and benzodiazepines in our addicted population, and those are the cause, for example in B.C., of probably at least, I'm going to guess, about half of the overdose deaths that we see.