Thank you.
You made a reference to commercial pill pressers. Now, there's a very alarming development, again in Manitoba. Some carfentanil made it into Winnipeg. I'm familiar with it from my residency. It is elephant tranquillizer. In residency, when I was doing my toxicology, I read that you would only encounter it if your hospital was near a large-animal veterinary facility like a zoo, because 20 years ago that was the only place you'd see that if there was an accidental exposure there. Times have changed, and it's shown up.
The form it showed up in in Winnipeg, unfortunately, was on paper blotters of the same form that young people will take other drugs like ecstasy, particularly at raves. There was nothing on it saying what was in it, but they had carfentanil, and the police found a fairly large shipment. There have been at least two carfentanil overdoses in Winnipeg in the last couple of months.
That being said, given that it's such an easy way to package fentanyl for consumption, would banning commercial pill pressers make that much of a difference, or would it just simply divert more of this to another form that makes it onto the street?