What I was envisioning was that we have a group of experts who assist Health Canada. Right now what happens is there are clinical trials conducted by drug companies, and Health Canada accepts that information as gospel. We really don't get to see the harm or the effects of that medication until it's used by the public. We're really the guinea pigs.
In this recommendation I was hoping that we could get some experts from all the different medical fields and also people with lived experience and family, who could assist before the approval of a drug. We need more scrutiny of these drugs before they go to market. If we talk about prevention, prevention has to start at the beginning. No prescriber with all the tools that they have, all the resources that they have—there's an opioid risk tool, there are the prescribing guidelines across Canada but they reflect a lot of information that came from industry, from drug companies. We need to remove that somewhat. We need to have people at the table who have the expertise, the researchers who can say “No. This is what will happen.” We cannot rely solely on someone who makes a product to tell you when and how to use it.
Prescribers don't have the power over addiction. Patients don't have that power. A doctor can't look at you and say, “Fill out this questionnaire. I think this is a good opioid risk tool. You're low risk so I'm going to give you these opioids”, or “You're high risk and I'll give you these opioids.” All the monitoring in the world isn't going to prevent the addiction. Addiction is a progressive, worsening, sometimes fatal disease. We have to prevent it, not talk about all these issues that are more reactionary.
The monitoring programs are great. Naloxone, sure it's great. I wish I had it; I could have administered the drug to my son. Those are all reactionary. We have to go to the initial preventative, proactive way. Tell a patient what the drug is. But a doctor can't tell me what it is, and they didn't by the way. They prescribed it to my son for pain when we left emergency, because he had renal colic kidney stones, and look what happened to him. It was prescribed legitimately. There's this false dichotomy I speak about as well. They don't have to abuse it.
We need the controls to assist Health Canada with what these drugs actually are. Look at the molecular structure of heroin. Look at oxycodone. They have the same effects on the brain, on the mind, and on the body. We shouldn't be surprised that people are dying, and whether it's one person or 5,000 people, we don't need all these statistics. We should be able to do something now.