burying the truth: former drug strategist pens book on canada's opioid crisis
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author reggie caverson with her book, opioids: burying the truth one person at a time. john lappa/sudbury star/postmedia network
john lappa
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sudbury star
when a powerful new painkiller entered the market in 1996 and was promoted as revolutionary because of its 12-hour time-release formula, reggie caverson was working in the field of substance abuse and mental health.
around that time, she was collaborating with law enforcement and with police, and beginning to observe substance misuse patterns spill onto the streets and into the criminal justice system. when she warned her colleagues about what she was witnessing – that a highly addictive opioid was being misused and that they must consider a connection between the rise in crime and overprescription of that drug – caverson says she was met with a wall of silence.
and despite an impressive professional background – she led the development of a drug strategy for ontario, was the provincial lead on national projects to address drugs with the canadian centre on substance abuse and co-led the development of the municipal drug strategy coordinators network of ontario, caverson would eventually be terminated from her job.
burnt out, she left the field entirely.
now she has written a book aimed at helping better address the opioid crisis by examining how it began and the missteps that contributed to its development. in opioids: burying the truth one person at a time, caverson draws on her three decades of frontline experience to examine how medical, regulatory and systemic failures helped fuel canada’s opioid epidemic.
“the purpose of opioids was around end-of-life care and cancer care,” said caverson. “and not for everything out there that causes pain.”
the opioid oxycontin was the primary drug prescribed for pain for 15 years before guidelines were developed, said caverson.
“i was working in the field when that first started,” she explained. “i was working all over the country with different police services. they kept saying something was happening on the streets, something that they’ve never seen before. they didn’t know what it was.”
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regular people, without any criminal records or known associations with organized crime, were being arrested for pharmacy robberies, break-and-enters, and theft.
“i did a research project in northeastern ontario with all those police chiefs, taking a look at all their occurrence reports and whether oxycontin was involved,” she said. “but what happens sometimes, when they write the report, it would be: there was a pharmaceutical robbery. that would be the primary statement, but then the secondary would be that it was oxycontin, but it wasn’t always documented that way. police reflect their data in different ways.”
however, with the data that was available, police were able to determine that one type of opioid, oxycontin, was behind much of the criminal activity, she said. caverson is quick to point out that police were the first to identify the problem.
when she went back to her colleagues to report what the police were observing, she asked for data that would corroborate what was happening on the streets. were addiction workers noticing the increase of opioid misuse, namely oxycontin, in their case files?
“we had zero data,” she said. “it wasn’t on their radar at the time.” instead, all prescribed drugs fell into one category; there was nothing to implicate one drug over another.
“i kept on going and telling all the agencies i worked with what i was seeing and what was going on,” she said. “they wanted to ignore it. they lumped it into ‘all prescribed drugs.’”
caverson said she was stonewalled everywhere she turned. that’s because the drug was quickly integrated into modern medicine.
in fact, the company that manufactured the drug, perdue pharmacy, funded and distributed a pain management textbook used in medical, dental and pharmacy institutions such as the university of toronto.
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“fast forward to today, and the problem hasn’t gone away,” said caverson. “and every time you turn around, you’ve got one agency that’s funded for a year or two, collects data and then when a new government comes in, that think tank’s gone and the group is gone, and all of a sudden, it’s like, who is collecting the data?”
part of the reason the opioid crisis persists today, said caverson, is due to their overprescription in canada.
more than 21 million opioid prescriptions were written in canada in 2024 alone, she said. “that must remain part of the national conversation.”
caverson said she wrote opioids: burying the truth one person at a time for policymakers, health professionals and regulators, first responders, police, addiction workers, educators, families affected by addiction and anyone looking to gain a deeper understanding of canada’s opioid crisis.
to purchase the book, visit www.opioidcrisis.ca for store locations.
bluesky: @sudburystar.bsky.social
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