Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to start off with Detective Harris, and perhaps Dr. Ulan, and Mr. MacPherson, you might want to come in on this.
I've used this several times in this committee since we first heard about it. Mr. Wallace from our prisons group came here and talked about the fact that 80% of new inmates come to the prison system already addicted or in trouble with medications. It just captured me, because I had a meeting with Chief De Caire, our police chief in Hamilton, and he was practically white the day he talked to me about this new drug, desomorphine, the street name of which is krokodil. We've had other people here talking about it.
When I looked at the mixture, the concoction is codeine mixed with gasoline, paint thinner, iodine, or hydrochloric acid. What's really frightening about this is that it's known as the flesh-eating drug, because the area you inject, you can wind up with a very messy situation. It's also called the “zombie drug”, so today with all the young people caught up in this zombie craze.... Now, people with common sense obviously can separate the fiction, but it's less expensive and far more hazardous than any version of heroin. It's more toxic, and the duration or action, the high, is even much shorter.
How did we reach this point? Is oxy to blame, the fact that it was there and then there's a real effort to pull back on it?
I have a couple of other questions, too. Does this desomorphine have a clinical usage? I can't imagine it does. Is it corporately manufactured, or is this something that's being concocted in some chemical lab in somebody's backyard?