Ontario will be the first province to stop paying for high doses of long-acting opioids as part of a push to reduce the "growing problem" of painkiller addiction in the province.
The Ministry of Health says it will be removing high doses of the painkillers from the Ontario Drug Benefit Formulary, which covers the cost of drugs for people who are 65 or older, live in a long-term care home, receive social assistance or have high drug costs relative to their income.
The affected drugs include 200-milligram tablets of morphine, 24-milligram and 30-milligram capsules of hydromorphone and 75-microgram per hour and 100-microgram per hour patches of fentanyl.
The ministry says the drugs will be removed from the formulary in January 2017.
Fentanyl in particular has dominated the headlines Canada-wide. Earlier this month, British Columbia's coroner's office announced that fentanyl was a main factor in a major surge in overdose deaths in the province.
Police in northwestern Ontario warned in June that some drugs being sold on the street as Percocet-brand painkillers and oxycodone may actually be fentanyl.
And a recent study showed that Ontario provincial inmates are 12 times more likely than the general public to die of a drug overdose within the first year following their release from incarceration, and 77 per cent of those deaths involved opioids.
