DISPENSING A SOLUTION

Concerned about methadone treatment in Ontario, Queen's Park has
rightly decided to create a task force to mend this province's frayed
methadone dispensing system.

Reporting directly to Health Minister George Smitherman, the expert
panel is to consider new policies on issuing potentially deadly
methadone to people needing help in abandoning addictive drugs.

About 14,000 addicts in Ontario currently use methadone, up sharply
from just 300 a decade ago.

However, Ontario's distribution system is burdened by a series of
troubling and pervasive flaws. Reporters Kevin Donovan and Jessica
Leeder recently exposed several of those problems in an ongoing
Toronto Star investigation.

They discovered that methadone programs active in several communities
depended on under-qualified staff to issue this drug, usually nurses
with no special methadone dispensing licences. In addition:

# Some doctors working with methadone patients are paid for treating
addicts they never actually see.

# Ontario's health-care system is being billed for thousands of
expensive urine tests for methadone recipients even though such tests
are rarely needed in patient care.

# Methadone doses are personalized for each user, since people's
tolerance varies a great deal. But instead of being prepared by
people familiar with an addict, hundreds of personalized doses have
been routinely shipped across the province from central facilities.

These are not mere technical concerns. The safety of thousands of
Ontarians may be at risk through a government-sanctioned methadone
system that has become entangled in a jungle of confusing rules and
overlapping jurisdictions.

In an especially worrisome development, Ontario's methadone-related
death rate more than doubled between 2000 and 2003, when almost 80
people died. That increase may be the result of more illegal use of
methadone, sold by street dealers, or it may point to fatal
shortcomings in the official distribution system.

A task force bringing together experts, including Chief Coroner Barry
McLellan, whose office is now probing two deaths in connection with
addiction treatment programs, should go a long way in sorting out the
province's methadone program.

Ontarians struggling to escape dangerous addictions already face
severe challenges. They deserve a better system.