Thank you for the question. I appreciate it.
The fundamental concern that people have about safe supply is what you guys have all alluded to, which is diversion, but the reality is that kids at school—high school students and university students—do not buy dillies from the people I look after downtown. Those people are scary. They look unkempt. They look threatening. Those are not the people the school kids are buying their dillies from. Their dillies are coming from the drug dealers who know how to manufacture them very cheaply and can get them to someone who looks like them and will act as their proxy. That's where the predominant number of drugs that are so-called diverted from safe supply are going.
Safe supply prescriptions are actually well regulated. I write those prescriptions. There are many times when we observe patients take those medications because we don't trust them enough to take them away. We trust some people. That maintains their autonomy. It helps build trust and allows us to engage with the other physical and mental health care disorders they have.
The number of people we have at Ottawa Inner City Health on safe supply is 50. There are far more prescriptions written for morphine and hydromorphone in an acute care hospital on any given day than those 50 people are getting.
Yes, there's an observation that school kids are using dillies. The inference that they're from safe supply is incorrect. You cannot connect those dots easily, reliably or consistently.