News — 29 November 2011
By Ally Dunham
The Nishnawbe Aski Nation (NAN) residents continued to be plagued by prescription drug abuse within their communities and are seeking different forms of action to help curb the problem, including the potential for a class action lawsuit.
“The problem has been here for a number of years and is a big concern for the whole community. It was approximately three years ago, when the former chief made it public in Kee-Way-Win about prescription drug abuse,” said Kee-Way-Win chief, David Thompson. “I know we’ve tried a number of things at the community level to try and curb the problems that we were facing. As a result we ended up searching luggages and keeping an eye on certain individuals who were known sellers.”
The NAN catchment is following other class action suits that are going on within the country, against Purdue Pharma, the makers of Oxycontin, to see the outcome and the benefits to the individuals making the claims.
“The frustration that everyone is experiencing is because of the legal end of it, there are individuals in the community that feel the leadership isn’t doing enough. But there is only so much that we are able to do,” said Thompson. “For us to walk into someone’s home and start digging around, who would like that? I can’t see myself disrupting someone’s home like that.”
Thompson relays that their hands are tied as far as searching individuals, which makes it very difficult to stop the arrival of the pills in the communities.
“I found out pretty quickly there were certain limitations on what we could do as a community without getting into some legal problems. We can’t body search anybody, we can’t touch them,” said Thompson. “Even if we did find out who was the supplier, it would take about two days to get a warrant and by that time everything’s gone.”
“They did a survey and what they found out was there was approximately 80 users. From the information that I got, there were 50 users that were on the heavy end of it. The balance were what they call “hard core users” where they actually inject the drugs into their system. The population here is roughly 400. It’s really frustrating.”
Thompson says in his community, they have a general idea of who the suppliers are, and many of the adults have on idea that their children are involved in drug use.
“The real sad part of it is that we have staff on payroll who are in key positions, who are into this kind of stuff, drugs. In some cases, some of them are suppliers, and that’s pretty hard to prove,” said Thompson.
Thompson is working with the NAN administration and surrounding chiefs in having a Suboxone treatment (opioid treatment medication used to treat opioid addiction) available on-reserve to assist in curbing the addictions. There are some issues with this though, security being one of them as the Suboxone itself is a drug that is very closely monitored.
Another alternative Thompson is working on in partnership with the Sioux Lookout medical community is to have a six-week detox and counselling services program brought to the communities so residents have a chance to clean up while remaining in their own environment.
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