The B.C. government does not know how many people are using unwitnessed safe supply drugs, three months after promising to end the practice to reduce diversion into the hands of organized crime.
The Ministry of Health confirmed it currently has no accurate way to know how many safe supply prescriptions are taken away from a pharmacy for use, called unwitnessed consumption, and therefore no way to chart progress on fulfilling its goal towards witnessed-only usage.
Instead, the government is scrambling to figure out a way to track the issue, almost four years after making the changes that allowed unwitnessed safe supply, and following a February declaration from the minister that practice would be ending.
“Since the witnessing is an instruction on a prescription (not a code), the ministry does not currently have the ability to track witnessed vs. unwitnessed doses centrally and in real time,” the ministry said in a statement.
“Presently, we rely on information provided by participating clinicians. As part of the implementation of the witnessed-only policy, the ministry is currently developing a system to track this information centrally during this interim period.”
The revelation comes after Premier David Eby stood in the legislature this month to claim both a reduction in safe supply prescriptions and progress in moving those people to a witnessed-only model.
His government has been under heavy fire after police and internal ministry documents confirmed some drug users are selling their safe supply prescriptions to organized criminals, which are then trafficking those government-supplied drugs provincially, nationally and internationally.
“There are 1,918 people receiving prescribed alternatives in the province,” Eby told the house on May 15.
“The vast majority of these individuals are already on witnessed programs as a result of the direction of government.”
But there appears to be no figures available to back up that assertion. When asked for a statistical breakdown, the Ministry of Health took a week before issuing the statement that the figures cannot be tracked.
The only statistics government does have available are that the total number of prescriptions issued for hydromorphone through the prescribed alternatives program, which it says has declined from 2,537 in February to 1,918 currently.
Under the changes, the government announced that all new people given safe supply prescriptions would have to consume the drugs in front of a pharmacist or designated health-care professional, and that existing patients would be “transitioned to witness consumption as soon as possible.”
But it also contained exemptions that government is similarly struggling to track.
One exemption states that some people will be allowed to remain on unwitnessed prescribed alternatives (PA) due to “extraordinary circumstances” such as “if the client is objectively benefiting from PA opioid medications, is carefully assessed and documented to have a very low risk of diversion, and clinical judgement determines that transitioning away from unwitnessed doses presents a significant risk of destabilization (i.e., return to toxic street drugs).”
The ministry could not provide the number of people who have been given exemptions either.
“They really have no idea what’s going on, and that’s a huge problem,” said Opposition BC Conservative critic Elenore Sturko.
“They should have always been tracking it. We have to make sure that harm reduction is not contributing to harm itself. They don’t have, and never have set up, adequate tracking to find out whether that’s actually happening.”
Sturko also questioned whether the safe supply reduction numbers cited by Eby reflect an actual drop in people, or are just part of government moving patients from hydromorphone to other products like fentanyl patches.
The government offered no timeline on how long it will take to create a system to track witnessed versus unwitnessed safe supply.
“The goal here is to transition everybody to witnessed,” said Eby. “That is well underway, and it’s only in extraordinary circumstances where it does not happen.”
The lack of data hasn’t stopped New Democrats from declaring progress, it seems. It’s just, there’s no actual numbers to back up their claims.
Rob Shaw has spent more than 17 years covering B.C. politics, now reporting for CHEK News and writing for The Orca/BIV. He is the co-author of the national bestselling book A Matter of Confidence, host of the weekly podcast Political Capital, and a regular guest on CBC Radio.
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