London Police are attempting to address the problem of safe supply drugs being diverted—traded or sold instead of used by the individual to whom they were prescribed.
“Diverted safe supply is being resold into our community,” said London Police Chief Thai Truong at a media conference yesterday. “It’s being trafficked into other communities and it is being used as currency in exchange for fentanyl, fueling the drug trade.”
The drug in question is a brand of hydromorphone known as Dilaudid, which comes in eight-milligram tablets and is prescribed as a safe alternative to street opioids. This year, London Police have seized over 11,000 pills that had been diverted to the streets.
Because there is a higher supply of these pills in London, they are cheaper to buy on the streets and can be resold in other communities for more money.
“That is a big concern for us, the law of supply and demand,” says Truong. “If you have a lot of supply, you are going to have less cost for it. Other jurisdictions, where the supply is not as abundant, that is where the price of the Dilaudid is increasing.”
Scott Courtice, the executive director of the London Intercommunity Health Centre, says clinics have a number of protocols to prevent this type of diversion.
“(Patients) provide a urine sample to ensure that the medication that we expect to be there is in their system, and if it’s not, that is an indication to us that there may be diversion that’s occurring,” says Courtice. “In those situations, our protocols allow everything from removing the person completely from the program, because diverting a medication is breaking trust with their clinician in a very significant way.”
He also says that there are other possible reasons for a patient not taking their hydromorphone.
“Sometimes we work with highly marginalized people,” he says. “So, sometimes, their medication may have been stolen.”
He says other options include switching from a take-home supply, to an observed dose taken at the pharmacy.
“We’re very confident in the protocols that we have,” says Courtice. “We think they serve us well, but we believe that by relying on some external fresh eyes and other perspectives that we may find opportunities to do better.”
