Thank you very much.
It's all very interesting, and I think the whole idea of how we got there is a very important question. But I want to remind everyone that this is not new, it's simply the global media that makes it new.
Back in the Victorian era, opium—from which “opiate” and “opioid” come—was taken by every good little Victorian lady. She had tincture of opium and she took it all the time. Opium was then a legal drug. Then it became illegal because of trade wars with China. So it isn't new, but what it points to is the fact that it's ongoing.
What we now know today, which we didn't know then, is that addiction is a chronic disease and it comes from lack of dopamine in the brain, which doesn't give you the right triggers to stop you from being addicted. This is why some people drink a lot of alcohol and don't become an alcoholic and others do become alcoholics. We've seen that happen. As teenagers we all went around trying to get drunk because we thought it was cool, then most of us went on to drink responsibly. But some of our friends, we know, never could stop. We now know that it's a chronic brain disease and that we need to deal with that.
You've all made a really good point about prescribing practices. Physicians—on the contrary, Mr. Lizon—don't know very much about addiction. We've only known a lot about addiction in the last 15 years. So you would give something, hoping you could take the person off it. If they happened to be the wrong person with the dopamine problem, they would stay on it and wouldn't be able to get off it.
I will tell you a story, because I think it's important and because I know I'm allowed to make comments as well as ask questions. Recently, a friend of mine had a baby and left the hospital. She had a C-section. She was fine, she got up, she walked out of there, great! For two days she was in the hospital. She was given OxyContin to help her with pain at home. I said to her, “You've been given what? Just tear up the prescription and throw it away”. That was a ridiculous thing to do. If you have pain, take Tylenol Extra Strength. But this is what we see. This is happening over and over, and then we have a problem.
There is a problem I want to bring to your attention. You questioned the problem, which I think is very valid, about the role of advertising. We know a lot of kids who take Ecstasy, etc. After awhile the amount of serotonin in their brain lowers and they become depressed after a good night on Ecstasy. So they go into their parents' medicine cabinet and take out an antidepressant and they get hooked on that, because that antidepressant raises the level of serotonin and they get to behave normally. So here is an illicit drug feeding the abuse of a prescription drug, which is a real problem. Advertising—all these names you see advertised on television about antidepressants—feeds that understanding of what drugs do what for you, for people who need to abuse them.
I do think the role of advertising of drugs, especially narcotics and opiates and barbiturates and antidepressants, all of those, is a really important thing for which this committee should think about making some kind of recommendation. Advertising really opens up this information for a lot of young people about what the drug can do for them. They open their parents' closet, their parents have it in their medicine cabinet, and boom, the young person takes it. I think it's a really important piece.
It's really not only about criminal activity, it's about what you talked about earlier on about education. I think we have to look at the advertising component of this. I think it's completely unnecessary and dangerous.
What do you think?