As Carole Bouchard alluded to earlier, those are some of the problems in the Food and Drugs Act and the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act as they stand. We take everything back. It's not just controlled substances; it's all prescription drugs, whether they be over the counter or not, depending on what schedule it is. And there's no accountability.
The problem is that if I take back medication from my community, I'm not just taking medications from my patients. I'm taking back medications from others, so there's no access to information with regard to where those prescriptions came from.
Sometimes the simplest solutions are actually in the policy itself, or sometimes controlling the access. At my pharmacy, I started a fentanyl return program about a year ago. Fentanyl is a patch used for chronic pain. I simply use it as an awareness campaign, not necessarily to complicate the treatment of chronic pain or to reduce access to fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a problem in Ottawa in a certain area, and more than heroin to a certain extent. All I said to my patients was, “Well, before you get your next part fill of your fentanyl, can I see those patches back?”
It has worked extremely well. I'm actually educating the patients that this is a dangerous drug and what's left in this patch is still usable and abusable. I'm a target for having it, so I want it out of my possession. I destroy them. In my pharmacy, I put them in a bucket and pour alcohol on them and cut them and get rid of them. But there's no real accountability among pharmacies as to what they're doing with those things.
As cbc.ca said to me online through the blog, I could be using them myself, which is not the case, but certainly it points to the lack of policy on that.