Thank you, Madam Speaker. Today I would like to rise and speak about the recent NWT chief coroner report regarding a female resident having a number of prescription medications in her system when she died from an accidental overdose in December 2012.
For me to start today, I have to go back about two years ago to almost the very day when I brought this issue up in the House, where I talked about the quiet addiction. That addiction is about the addictions to opiates, benzodiazepines and to codeine. I don’t believe it’s quiet anymore and I believe the recent report from the coroner reaffirms what we have spoken up about, this sleeping giant of the drug addiction journey, and that we need to spend a little more attention on this emergent
addiction. From the words of our own NWT coroner, “From 2009 to 2012, we had over 1,700 overdose cases from prescription medication and over-the-counter medications.”
These are the deaths that were investigated, but we have to ask ourselves how many more deaths out there did not see the light of day.
Speaking of light of day, I always say sunshine is the best disinfectant. We’ve heard this again in the House: you can’t fix what you can’t count. So, we need to put some sunshine on why we’re not tracking prescription drug abuse and over-the-counter abuse in our system, and why it isn’t part of our overall general addictions survey. This is quite shameful to continue to hear.
Without a dedicated baseline to the program that we’re spending in areas of addiction, how does the department decide on which dollars go where and how they are spent? Without doing this baseline, which I am calling the quiet addiction, we do not know the end results of what can be done for the people who are suffering in this mode here.
With that, I will be asking the Minister of Health, later on today, about a lot of these unanswered questions in this quiet addiction prescription drug abuse, and hopefully we can get some of these questions answered and put a little sunshine on the situation. Thank you, Madam Speaker.