Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers 21 Originally published in BLUE LINE magazine, May 2012 – reprinted with permission by Lucas Habib GETTING AWAY FROM THE UNDERGROUND Moose Jaw Police tackle the over prescription of drugs When it comes to law and order, the small city of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan has a history as colourful as its name. At the turn of the century, city buildings were mostly heated by steam. To service the boilers without enduring the frigid prairie winters, engineers constructed an elaborate network of tunnels beneath the downtown. During American prohibition, the Soo Line railway ran straight from Moose Jaw to Chicago; consequently, vicebased businesses began opening up shop in the tunnels and “The Jaw” became a hub for bootleg liquor distribution to the Windy City and across the US. Moose Jaw became known as ‘Little Chicago’ and Al Capone is rumoured to have visited numerous times (although no proof actually exists). Nearly a century later, Moose Jaw’s biggest law enforcement problem isn’t bootlegging – it’s prescription drug abuse. Whether in big cities, rural areas or remote First Nations reserves, prescription drugs are a growing crisis across Canada. Law enforcement agencies are battling the problem with some success, yet the problem continues to intensify. Prescription opioids have been the leading cause of accidental overdoses in the US and Canada since 2001 and property crime has increased in many areas to feed these addictions. According to the International Narcotics Control Board, as of 2008, Canada has the highest per capita consumption rate of oxycodone in the world. In Moose Jaw, oxycodone and morphine are the two main problems. In 2009, Cst. Taylor Mickleborough of the Moose Jaw Police Service was getting tired of dealing with drugrelated property crime. His creative thinking skills led to his finding a way to help the Jaw’s opioid addicts while simultaneously reducing crime. From his confidential informants, he discovered that the city was well-known throughout Saskatchewan as a place where opioids were the drug of choice. “We also learned that Moose Jaw had a few doctors with inappropriate boundaries in their prescribing habits,” recalls Mickleborough. “We had drugs that had originated from a few local doctors that were being discovered during investigations in other jurisdictions. We were also told that users from other areas are coming to Moose Jaw to obtain prescriptions from those few doctors.” Mickleborough and his team approached the doctor but had mixed results. Clearly, traditional approaches weren’t improving the situation – it was time for something new. They came up with a “pretty simple idea,” says Mickleborough. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Saskatchewan has one pharmacist on staff, Doug Spitzig, whose job is to monitor misprescription and overprescription of drugs, but he was missing a critical piece of information - street-level intel. “All we did,“ says Mickleborough,” was reach out to him.” Police collected a list of about 50 high-risk users and dealers from their proven-reliable sources. After some cross-referencing and fact checking, they handed the list to Spitzig, who in turn drafted letters to the doctors in question, asking them to justify their prescriptions to the suspected abusers and traffickers. With this approach, the doctors said they were pleased that drug misusers has been identified and agreed to help. To date, Mickleborough and Spitzig have been very happy with the physicians’ response. Despite this initial success, Mickleborough and Spitzig recognize the problems might recur. Now that the college is involved there are options for regulatory discipline of wayward physicians, including hearing, loss of prescribing license competency, assessments and investigations into non-professional conduct. So far, it hasn’t come to that. “We’ve already seen both quantitative and qualitative results,” states Mickleborough. Forty-two percent of the identified misusers on his master list either had their prescriptions ended or dose-tapered – but Continued... Moose Jaw Police Cst. Taylor Mickleborough with Saskatchewan College of Physicians and Surgeons Pharmacist Investigator Doug Spitzig.
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