It wasn’t exactly a secret. But now one of the more disturbing elements of Ontario’s long-term care system is fully out in the open.

Far too many nursing homes are doping elderly clients with powerful antipsychotic drugs. The reason? Old people, particularly those suffering from dementia, are easier to handle when heavily drugged.

When they are blotto, they don’t make demands. They don’t require as much staff. They don’t need to be watched. They just sit or lie there, dazed.

And eventually, when some die from the side effects of these powerful drugs, there is a ready-made excuse: They were old.

Old people are expected to die.

The scope of this drug use came to light thanks to the efforts of my Star colleagues Jesse McLean, David Bruser and Andrew Bailey — with the help of Toronto Liberal backbencher Donna Cansfield, who painstakingly collected much of the data.

The Star-Cansfield investigation found that in 40 Ontario nursing homes, roughly half the residents are on antipsychotics — even though such drugs are not approved by Health Canada for elderly patients with dementia.

And whoops! It appears that the provincial Liberal government knew all about it. As McLean and Bruser reported Monday, the government has at hand a report on the use of such drugs in nursing homes.

The report — available only to those who specifically ask the Health Ministry for it — concludes that 38 per cent of all Ontario nursing home residents, some 35,506 people in total, were prescribed antipsychotics in 2012.

More than 10,000 nursing home residents were on both antipsychotics and sedatives, a combination that, according to one of the co-authors of this report, can be particularly dangerous.

Why so many? In some cases, seniors do suffer from conditions, such as schizophrenia, that these drugs are meant to address.

In others, so-called off-label use may be justified if the patient suffers dementia-induced delusions that lead to violence.

But in far too many cases, it seems, such drugs are prescribed simply for the convenience of all concerned.

Cash-strapped nursing homes don’t want to hire more staff. Governments don’t want to spend more on long-term care than the politics of the moment demand. Voters begrudge paying taxes.

All are aided and abetted by physicians who are far too casual in prescribing antipsychotics for off-label use, that is, for conditions the drugs were not designed to address.

The drug manufacturers themselves warn that giving antipsychotic drugs to elderly patients suffering from dementia can greatly increase the risk of death.

What’s so shocking about all of this is that so few are shocked.

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Health Minister Deb Matthews said it wasn’t her problem.

“Let’s remember, it’s doctors who prescribe these drugs not the government,” she told reporters last week.

She said the government has spent $43 million on a program aimed at controlling the behaviour of nursing home patients without recourse to drugs — which, I suppose is a start.

But I would bet that if she had been asked about newborn infants being put at risk by dubious prescribing she wouldn’t have been quite so casual.

And yet what is the difference? Both newborns and the elderly are people. Both have a legal and moral right to life. Both can be physically fragile

Indeed, one of society’s great advances over the last century has been the reduction of infant mortality. We spare no expense to keep babies alive — even for just a few years.

But the elderly, for some reason, are treated as less worthy. We set up nursing homes for them, but don’t fund them properly.

If older people give us even the smallest bit of bother, we drug them. And if those drugs lead to death, we shrug.

They are old, we say. Forgetting that this is a statement which applies to us all, we add: They were going to die anyway.