I think there is a lot of consensus in the room. Through the college of family physicians federally, really ensure that part of the curriculum includes the prevention and treatment of addiction.
I don't want to bash specialists—I'm a specialist myself—but this disease is so common. It's not something rare like rheumatoid arthritis or something that's relatively uncommon. As you've heard, this is 10% of the population. So we need a primary-care-based strategy to train physicians. In the example that was given with the emergency room, they're saying it's intoxication, but they know exactly what's going on. It's just that the health care system is a deer in the headlights; it does not know what to do. So it's about training health care providers and developing evidence-based guidelines and standards.
Just to give you an example, at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, between January and August there were 2,700 non-fatal overdoses that presented to the emergency room. The literature clearly shows that people who have had a non-fatal overdose are at a heightened risk of a subsequent fatal overdose. So there's a very captive audience. You want to do something about it. There is no system. It's not a broken system: there is no system in place.
I don't want to make it seem so daunting that no one knows what to do. There should be standards in the emergency room and evidence-based pathways and referrals to programs, because I tell you, the Canadian taxpayer is hemorrhaging money to send ambulances, to send police, to treat the infections, to treat the lung disease or the liver disease—all the things that go along with untreated addiction. So there's money to be saved, but what's required is to train health care practitioners and establish guidelines.