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“It’s sad to say that most pharmacists have come to accept this as an occupational hazard,” he said. “As a gatekeeper for medication, they know there is always a risk … that at one point they’re going to be looking down the barrel of a gun or at the point of a knife.”

The criminals who hold up pharmacies seeking opioid drugs have resorted to increasingly unusual weapons, added Mr. Malek, including lighter-aerosol-can combinations that can be turned into instant “flame throwers” to, in one case, simply dousing a pharmacist with gasoline and threatening to set the druggist alight.

“That’s all it took,” he said. “The strategies that are being applied, there’s no end to them.”

Pharmacies, distributors and wholesalers are required to report to Health Canada any thefts, robberies, pilfering by employees, losses in transit, “unexplained” losses and other disappearances of so-called controlled substances — prescription drugs with a potential for abuse and harm.

Attention has focused on opioid painkillers in recent years, as increased prescribing has made Canada second only to the U.S. in per capita consumption of the potent medications.

The rate of addiction and overdose deaths has mounted at the same time, both among Canadians prescribed the drugs by a doctor and those who buy them on the street. As many Ontario residents die now from the drugs as are killed in auto accidents, coroner’s office statistics suggest.

The Health Canada loss figures are a reminder the street supply does not just originate from people who sell what is prescribed to them personally, said Benedikt Fischer, a drug-abuse expert at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University.