Adam Zivo: ‘Safer Supply’ Is the OxyContin Crisis All Over Again

The prescription medicine OxyContin is displayed at a drugstore in Brookline, MA, in a file photo. (Darren McCollester/Getty Images)

Commentary

Canadian harm reduction activists believe that “safer supply” can reduce overdoses and deaths by providing addicts with easy access to “safe” pharmaceutical opioids—but we already tried this experiment 20 years ago. It was called the OxyContin crisis and it had nightmarish results. So why are we making the same mistakes all over again?

Before the late 1990s, opioid abuse had not been a significant issue in North America for decades. As opioid prescribing was generally restricted to managing pain for terminally ill cancer patients, opportunities for prescription opioids to trickle into the black market and fuel new addictions were limited.

Illicit heroin existed, of course, but it was highly stigmatized, even amongst addicts, which dissuaded people from experimenting with the drug. As a result, heroin’s popularity was mostly limited to small, stable clusters of highly-marginalized users in major urban centres.

Everything changed in the late 1990s when an unscrupulous pharmaceutical company, Purdue Pharma, used fraud and deception to sell its new flagship product, OxyContin, which was functionally slow-release heroin.

North America’s contemporary opioid crisis, which has raged for over two decades and killed hundreds of thousands of people, can be traced back to this point.

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Purdue falsely claimed that OxyContin was safe and caused addiction in less than 1 percent of users. The company then commissioned new studies that made similarly false or misleading claims, paid kickbacks to doctors who liberally prescribed the drug, and quietly funded a network of “activist” organizations that propagated the idea that providing opioids for moderate pain was “compassionate.”

OxyContin use exploded—but it turned out that there was no such thing as a “safe” pharmaceutical opioid. Not only did users quickly develop debilitating addictions, often in rural and suburban areas where opioid abuse was historically unknown, many of them later graduated to heroin, which was cheaper, when they ran low on funds.

Drug dealers and gangs would organize networks of addicts to secure as much OxyContin as possible to resell on the black market. As the drug was typically covered by insurance and thus free for users, this scheme was highly profitable. Meanwhile, some doctors opened “pain clinics” that prescribed OxyContin to almost anyone who asked for it, no matter how obvious it was that their “patients” were actually recreational addicts. These clinics, later dubbed “pill mills,” were money-printing machines.

By the early 2010s, Purdue Pharma was deluged in lawsuits and record-breaking fines and OxyContin prescribing was severely restricted. Many pill mill doctors were stripped of their licences, and similarly prosecuted or sued.

Yet, by this point, enough addicts existed to maintain a thriving illicit heroin and fentanyl market, so the opioid crisis continues to rage to this day, killing tens of thousands of people annually.

One would think that, given what happened with OxyContin, Canada would be cautious about flooding communities with pharmaceutical opioids—but it isn’t.

The federal government has instead been pushing “safer supply,” a strategy that claims to reduce overdoses and deaths by providing free addictive drugs as an alternative to potentially tainted illicit street substances. Typically, that means handing out hydromorphone, an opioid as powerful as heroin, as if it were candy.

The similarities between safer supply and the OxyContin crisis are hard to miss.

There is clear evidence that safer supply programs are being widely defrauded and that addicts routinely resell (“divert’) their hydromorphone on the black market to buy stronger substances, typically fentanyl. As a result, some communities are being flooded with diverted hydromorphone, which has fuelled new addictions, including among youth. Former addicts and online drug dealers have also testified that organized crime is involved and that dealers assemble teams of safer supply patients to secure as much hydromorphone as possible for black market trafficking.

Safer supply advocates have dismissed reports of mass diversion as “anecdotal,” which was the exact same strategy Purdue employed to undermine early journalistic exposés of the OxyContin crisis. However, safer supply advocates have also uniquely argued that opioid diversion should be tolerated because it is “mutual aid” and “compassionate sharing”—a narrative that addiction physicians say is ludicrous.

As with OxyContin, many of the studies that support safer supply are shoddy, yet they, too, enjoy the promotion of a network of activist organizations with questionable finances. Many of these organization receive federal funding and seem to simply parrot the government’s talking points on safer supply.

Functionally speaking, the difference between a safer supply clinic and an OxyContin pill mill is often negligible. In both cases, free pharmaceutical opioids are recklessly showered upon addicts, who then resell them to everyone else, leading to misery. The main difference is that, this time, the root of the problem is not a pharmaceutical company, but rather the government itself.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.