By: Jeanne Armstrong
The Charlatan
October 12, 2010

Mike remembers what he was doing when actor Heath Ledger died.

He and his friends were speedballing - chasing lines of cocaine followed by crushed-up OxyContin, a pain reliever.

Ledger supposedly died by mixing the same pain reliever Mike and his friends were using with other drugs.

Mike, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, says he and his friends had laughed about it at the time, but he admits Ledger's death scared him.

Roughly a month before he'd started snorting the drug with his friends, Mike, a 21-year-old York University student, says he really did need it for pain.

When he broke his finger in a car accident the doctor prescribed him five-milligram pills of OxyContin, the brand name for the opioid pain reliever oxycodone.

Oxy, as Mike calls it, is available by prescription and used to treat severe pain.

Mike says he used Oxy for about a month during the York University strike in 2008-2009.

He describes the feeling as "euphoric," and once it hits you completely, you feel numb all over.

But Oxy isn't like other drugs, he says.

If you're drunk, or on an upper drug, you might feel compelled to go out, spend money or risk getting into a fight.

On Oxy, Mike says, you're content with doing a whole lot of nothing.

"It's not a drug you make memories on. That's my memory of it - that I have no memories."

On the up and up

For a drug that makes you so sluggish, OxyContin is one prescription drug that's certainly gaining ground.

Gary Wand, the program co-ordinator at Harvest House, an Ottawa rehabilitation centre, says there are a few reasons why OxyContin in particular is becoming so popular as a drug of choice.

For one, he says it is extremely addictive because it is so effective for pain relief management.

"You're hearing the writings on the wall for Oxy . . . people are recognizing that it's a lot more potent than what it was initially made out to be," Wand says.

The staff at Harvest House reported that OxyContin has surpassed crack cocaine as Ottawa's most commonly misused drug, according to a CBC article published this past spring.

Prescription drugs like OxyContin have slowly been red-flagged for prescription drug abuse over the past decade in Canada, as seen by a variety of surveys conducted across the country.

The Canadian Alcohol and Drug Use Monitoring Survey, launched in 2008 by Health Canada, maps alcohol and illicit drug use among Canadians aged 15 and older.

The survey found 9.5 per cent of young people aged 15 to 24 said they've used prescription drugs to get high, while only 1.3 per cent aged 25 and over said the same.  

Another study found that opioid pain relievers specifically were popular among middle and high school students.

The Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey (OSDUHS), released annually by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), studies the patterns of drug use among Ontario students from Grades 7 to 12.

The study found that opioid pain relievers were the third-most used drug by Ontario students, with alcohol and cannabis taking first and second, respectively.

This translates to approximately 18 per cent of Ontario students - which represents about 180,200 people in the province - who have used an opioid pain reliever non-medically in 2008.

Angela Boak, a research co-ordinator at CAMH and co-author of the annual OSDUHS, says there is reason for concern in this statistic. Especially, she notes, since opioid pain relievers have surpassed tobacco as the drug of choice for students.

Only 12 per cent of Ontario students reported smoking cigarettes in the past year, which is 6 per cent lower than those who had tried pain relievers.

And as for how students get their hands on prescription drugs, the study reported that three-quarters of Ontario students obtain them from home.

"[This age group] doesn't have the disposable income to purchase drugs, so they take what they can get, and are getting it from home for whatever purpose," Boak says.

An appointment away

For young adults like Mike, grabbing pills from mom and dad isn't really necessary - obtaining prescription drugs is as easy as visiting your closest walk-in clinic.

Mike says he has friends who have lied about the extent of the pain they were in just to get an opioid pain reliever prescription.

"You don't directly say ‘I want Oxy,' you just sort of complain about the pain, and that you don't know what to do. Of course it depends on the doctor, but I'm sure there are doctors that just hand it out," he says.

After all, he says, that's how he got Oxy.

Mike says breaking his finger definitely hurt, but he doubts he needed the heavy-duty OxyContin for it.

"Pain is a normal process of life, you have to feel pain . .   I definitely didn't need [Oxy]."

Recently, Ontario health minister Deb Matthews has zeroed in on this issue. She's proposed a system for the province that aims to monitor doctors and pharmacists that are too easily prescribing prescription drugs to patients.

A bill for the tracking system was tabled in the Ontario legislature this September.

The system would issue an alert if patients are "double-doctoring" - in other words, trying to obtain the same prescription by going to several doctors.

A Toronto Star investigation published in January 2009 reported that in the previous year, Ontario doctors prescribed more than $54 million of OxyContin, compared to the $19 million that was prescribed only five years earlier.

Tackling the issue

While Ontario's new program could be a step in the right direction, education initiatives in Canada for prescription drug abuse, among young adults specifically, are lacking, according to Caleb Chepesiuk, director of Canadian Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (CSSDP).

CSSDP is a network of student groups that challenges the criminalization of drug use and policy in Canada. The group launched a tongue-in-cheek website that was a direct swipe at Health Canada's official youth drug prevention website, Not4Me.ca.

Naturally, the CSSDP's version of the website carries the same name, but ends in .org.

Chepesiuk says one of the big problems with the official Not4Me website is that while it gives preventative information on drugs like meth, heroin and LSD, there isn't a section for prescription drugs.

"There's this idea that illicit drugs have a huge stigma, but there has been a huge influx in stimulants and opioids," Chepesiuk says. "There was no stigma around these drugs in the same way there was around crack or ecstasy."

And it's this lack of stigmatization - the idea that somehow prescription drugs are safer than illegal narcotics - that has caused Canadian health officials, as well as many of the young people who abuse drugs, to turn a blind eye, Chepesiuk argues.

"Drug education has almost created this problem," he says.

The CSSDP isn't the only one crying foul over the lack of prescription drug abuse education in Canada.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario released a report this September calling for a more comprehensive provincial policy on pain reliever abuse.

The report, titled "Avoiding Abuse, Achieving a Balance: Tackling the Opioid Public Health Crisis," calls on government, academic institutions, and community organizations through 31 recommendations in order to tackle what they are calling the "opioid public health crisis."

Into the void

When Mike ran out of his five-milligram prescription, he says he couldn't just stop there - he had to have more.

He was able to buy the leftovers of a friend's 80-milligram prescription, so he continued, while also increasing his dosage.

But soon, that too was gone, and he says he had trouble tracking down any more without going searching for it.

"When we ran out, I was still thinking about it for half a year . . . I would still do it if the opportunity came up," he admits.

While it's the nostalgia about the drug - "the euphoria of doing nothing," he says - that keeps him interested, he says he knows it's one of the worst drugs he's gotten himself into.

"When people do MDMA, ecstasy, and all those types of drugs, they're doing them to have fun . . . but when you do Oxy, you're doing it because there's a void."

Original article at: http://www.charlatan.ca/content/devil-medical-cabinet