Yes, thank you. That's a very good question.
We have seen a couple of indicators that we consider to be positive.
As I mentioned early on in my speech, we have seen some decreases in the number of positive urinalysis tests. When we did the random testing of inmates in the penitentiaries, we saw a decrease in the percentage of individuals who were showing a positive urinalysis test. That indicates to us that there are still drugs getting into our institutions, which is a problem for us, but it indicates that, overall, the percentage is coming down.
We also have seen that the number of seizures of drugs at the front entrance and in the institutions has gone up. Now, you can argue that more seizures means one thing or more seizures means another. From my perspective, every seizure is a good seizure, because it means those drugs are not getting into the hands of inmates who can harm my staff, harm themselves, or, ultimately, harm another inmate. Last year we had just over 1,700 drug seizures in the institutions, and that's a significant find for us.
There is another indicator, though it's not necessarily as scientific as some of the other data. We do know that at times, when the supply of drugs coming into the institutions has been cut off, inmates will look to other means for some kind of intoxicant. Usually they'll start to try to make brews, homemade alcohol, in the institution. You can make homemade alcohol from a lot of different commonly available substances. Some of the worst ones I've seen were made out of those little ketchup things that you get from McDonald's. It's not very good tasting and it smells terrible, but you can get a brew out of that.
When we see the number of drug seizures going down and the number of brews that the staff are seizing going up, we see those as partial indicators that our efforts around seizing drugs are working and moving in the right direction. It's an indication that we're cutting off the drug supply coming in. But we still have a lot of challenges.
As we put our time and energy in to choke off the drug supply at one spot, people become quite innovative in looking at how to get drugs in. As I briefly mentioned in my comments, there have been people from the outside who have approached our perimeter and launched drugs over the fence using bows and arrows. They are 150 metres outside the perimeter, and they shoot arrows into the exercise yard, with the drugs either in the shaft of the arrow or taped around it. Then my staff have to go out and search the yard and they find those.
We've seen individuals become quite innovative at taking tennis balls, hollowing out the tennis balls, and filling them with drugs. If you get a good—and I'm dating myself—Bjorn Borg swing on the tennis ball with a racket, you can launch it quite a distance, and they sometimes make it inside the fence.
We've even seen cases where individuals have taken dead birds, removed the innards, stuffed the drugs inside, and then, we believe, launched them with some kind of slingshot device into the yard.
Again, my staff are very diligent. They do a great job in terms of searching and finding these things, but the odd time something gets in. We have cases of individuals being found using drugs, or my staff end up interrupting a drug overdose and saving the lives of an inmate who is stupid enough to use the drugs.