Five deaths from opioids in a fortnight have prompted the police and drugs experts to warn Canberrans about the dangers of buying what they think are safe medical drugs off the internet - to find, too late, that they are not.
Drugs experts fear a new kind of drug much more powerful than morphine or heroin is being bought online unwittingly by Canberrans seeking sleeping tablets or painkillers.
Apart from the five fatalities, there have been another two overdoses not leading to death in the last two weeks. Police fear that opiates - either as narcotics or "medical" drugs - may have taken the lives of three Canberrans a month in the year so far.
"ACT Policing is warning of potentially lethal illicit drugs circulating in Canberra after five fatal suspected drug overdoses in the past fortnight," Detective Superintendent Peta Lankester said.
The police said it was too early to say definitely whether it was narcotics or backdoor medicinal drugs which caused the latest spate of deaths.
But people who run the pills-testing service CanTEST feared an influx into the ACT of easily accessible highly dangerous drugs, bought online as pharmaceuticals. These pills were being bought online and taken by ordinary people as sleeping aids, anti-depressants or painkillers but the taker didn't realise the tablets had been adulterated with highly potent substances.
One of these drugs is much stronger than heroin or morphine.
"Nitazenes are a class of drug - it's a synthetic opioid, similar to fentanyl, but it can be up to a thousand times stronger than morphine," Bronwyn Hendry, head of ACT Directions (which includes CanTEST), said.
"They're often not what they purport to be. So they're buying oxycodone or they're buying benzodiazepines in some form or other, like Valium or Temazepam or Alprazolam, and the drug doesn't turn out to be that," Ms Hendry who specialised in emergency psychiatry said.
Because the drugs are bought from outside the health system, it's impossible to know where they come from or what their contents are. The assumption was from outside Australia, possibly China.
In recent years, there's been an opioid epidemic in the United States. There is no documented epidemic in Australia so far - but the figures take time to be evaluated, sometimes years.
But the authorities are worried that the current spate of deaths indicates an increase in the availability of lethal substances for people who wouldn't take drugs like heroin for recreational reasons.
"The US a few years ago experienced a huge spike in fentanyl deaths, and that was a primarily a result of a lot of people being prescribed fentanyl and then not being able to be prescribed anymore, and then sourcing fentanyl illicitly. We haven't had that problem in Australia, thank goodness," Ms Hendry said.
"But unfortunately now, nitazenes have crept into the illicit drug market, and they're worse than fentanyl. Nitazenes were developed in the 50s, but they were decided to be too dangerous, too high risk of overdose, so they never went to market as a pharmaceutical."
Her organisation runs the CanTEST pill and drugs testing site at which anyone to turn up and have substances tested, without any judgment made on the person involved or a risk of him or her being reported to the authorities or anyone else.
The testing site is currently at a temporary location at Level 5 at 71 Northbourne Avenue.
If someone suffers an overdose of opioids, Bronwyn Hendry recommended calling an ambulance but also using a nasal inhaler called Nyxoid or Naloxone.
"You get them in packs," Ms Hendry said. "We give them free at all our outlets. In participating pharmacies, you can get them free as well," she said.
"And it has absolutely no effect besides reversing an overdose. It can't cause any ill effects to someone."
The CanTEST website is: cantest.com.au and the email is [email protected].
