hang on I posted this the other day
no beat me to it by one day
Brandishing weapons ranging from guns and knives to home-made flame throwers, criminals continue to siphon away a large chunk of the nation’s powerful narcotic painkillers, Health Canada figures indicate.
Hundreds of thousands of units of oxycodone, morphine and other “opioids” are still being robbed, pilfered or otherwise lost from the pharmacy supply chain, despite some recent improvements, the statistics reveal.
The numbers suggest theft and other losses from those business continue to be a significant source of the country’s rampant prescription drug-abuse problem — and the thriving street trade that helps fuel it.
Pharmacists have come to accept this as an occupational hazard
Loss of such narcotics from pharmacies has decreased in the last two years, after a sharp spike in 2011, the numbers suggest. But that may be just a temporary dip in what remains for the profession a “major problem,” said Allan Malek, a senior vice president with the Ontario Pharmacists’ Association.
“It’s sad to say that most pharmacists have come to accept this as an occupational hazard,” he said. “As a gatekeeper for medication, they know there is always a risk … that at one point they’re going to be looking down the barrel of a gun or at the point of a knife.”
The criminals who hold up pharmacies seeking opioid drugs have resorted to increasingly unusual weapons, added Mr. Malek, including lighter-aerosol-can combinations that can be turned into instant “flame throwers” to, in one case, simply dousing a pharmacist with gasoline and threatening to set the druggist alight.
“That’s all it took,” he said. “The strategies that are being applied, there’s no end to them.”
Pharmacies, distributors and wholesalers are required to report to Health Canada any thefts, robberies, pilfering by employees, losses in transit, “unexplained” losses and other disappearances of so-called controlled substances — prescription drugs with a potential for abuse and harm.
Attention has focused on opioid painkillers in recent years, as increased prescribing has made Canada second only to the U.S. in per capita consumption of the potent medications.
The rate of addiction and overdose deaths has mounted at the same time, both among Canadians prescribed the drugs by a doctor and those who buy them on the street. As many Ontario residents die now from the drugs as are killed in auto accidents, coroner’s office statistics suggest.
The Health Canada loss figures are a reminder the street supply does not just originate from people who sell what is prescribed to them personally, said Benedikt Fischer, a drug-abuse expert at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.
“There shouldn’t really be any losses from pharmacies or suppliers or producers,” he said. “Robberies or thefts are sometimes difficult to prevent, but that’s the responsibility of the people who carry these drugs or produce or supply them.”
In fact, professional associations do offer advice to pharmacists on how to curb robberies and theft, said Mr. Malek.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/01...Top+Stories)
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