That's a fair question.
I have talked to some people who do this. We do not have this in my country. You would be right to say that I'm looking at this from far away.
We do though, of course, have the experience of opioid prescribing. When it was OxyContin, many of those people getting it were addicted and did addict other people. If we wanted to know if that phenomenon had somehow stopped for some reason with safe supply—I don't know why we would assume that, but if we did—what we would do is run something that has not been done. There's nothing of this sort in the literature. You would run urine screens on every single person on safe supply every day, and any day when they did not have the drug supplied in their urine, you would ask them, “Where did that drug go?” Then you would find that person and see if they overdosed, fatally or non-fatally, or whether they had initiated an addiction with that medication.
That has not been done. That's what I would do if I were really monitoring this closely and I was concerned about harms to the community. We were very casual about that possibility for a very long time with OxyContin, and we regretted it. Because that has not been done, I am frankly worried that we're doing the same thing again.