In the new year, Paul Toivo could see the price of his morphine prescription jump by as much as 2,400 per cent.
Toivo currently pays $2 a month for his morphine. That could increase to as much as $50 a month on Jan. 1, 2017, when the Ontario Drug Benefit program will no longer cover high-strength opioids. It's part of an effort to combat a major problem: addiction to prescription opioids.
And while some have called opioid addiction a national epidemic that must be brought under control, Toivo says people like him — who truly benefit from the pain relief afforded by the drug — are caught in the middle.
Unable to work for more than two decades, the financial impact of removing opioids from the Ontario Drug Benefit program would be huge for him, Toivo said.
“It's not right the way I'm being treated. Why am I being tortured?” said Toivo (Not his real name. Upon his request, Sudbury.com is identifying him by a pseudonym as if it's widely known he has a high-strength opioid prescription, Toivo worries it could make him a target for thieves). “I completely understand the abuse issue with opioids, but why am I the one that's being punished?”
In December 1994, Toivo was in a serious car accident while on a short drive to purchase a Christmas tree for his family.
A driver in the oncoming lane lost control on the icy road, and crashed into his Dodge pickup truck.
“I got the steering shaft in my ribs,” he said.
The impact shattered his rib cage, and caused spinal stenosis – a compression of the spinal cord that can cause severe pain.
“I couldn't sleep at all because I was in so much pain,” he said about the months following his accident. “The pain got to the point sometimes where I would actually pass out.”
After the crash, he saw a number of doctors who weren't able to help treat his chronic pain.
Then, he finally found a physician who prescribed him muscle relaxants and an anti-depressant to help him sleep.
His doctor also prescribed him Oxycocet (also known as Percocet), to help relieve his pain.
“Finally, I was able to get two hours sleep,” he said.
It wasn't until several years later that Toivo's doctor added morphine to his growing list of prescription medications.
He avoided the powerful painkiller at first.
“My body was broken and I didn't want my brain to be scrambled,” he said.
But his constant pain had become too severe to pass up on a drug that could give him a better quality of life.
Even now, morphine is just a part of his regimen to control and manage his chronic pain. Toivo takes synthetic and liquid marijuana as muscle relaxants. He still takes Oxycocet for regular pain management, but the stronger morphine helps him manage when he leaves the comfort of his home.
Besides the drugs, Toivo uses physiotherapy, yoga and aquatic exercise to help manage his pain.
With deaths of opioid overdoses on the rise across Ontario researchers like Tara Gomes, a principal investigator with the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network, have argued high-strength variants should be pulled off the market for all but the most extreme cases (like palliative care patients).
But despite his efforts to control his chronic pain with exercise and other medications, morphine remains an important part of Toivo's pain relief.
“That would be the end of my life,” he said, when asked what would happen if he no longer had access to morphine.
