The head doctor at Sydney’s medically supervised injecting centre has compared the rise of synthetic opioids to a pandemic and says she is worried the government isn’t willing to make the “hard decisions” necessary to prepare for it.
Dr Marianne Jauncey began raising the alarm about the increasing prevalence of nitazenes earlier this year but was concerned the Minns Labor government had been reluctant to act because it “still feels for many like an emerging news story”.
She said that while New South Wales Health officials were “trying to take this seriously”, she was concerned about a lack of political will to take necessary measures to combat the threat, including by rolling out drug-checking services.
“Sometimes public servants are limited in what they can do by the laws of the land and the politicians of the day,” she said.
“Whether or not the politicians are prepared to make what might feel like some hard decisions, I don’t know. That … is where I’m concerned.”
Nitazenes are a type of synthetic opioid which are often mixed into other drugs without users’ knowledge. They have been linked to more than 200 deaths in North America and Europe between 2019 and 2023.
Earlier this year, NSW Health warned that nitazenes could be up to 500 times more potent than heroin and said four people had been hospitalised after ingesting them and suffering “severe” overdoses.
Jauncey said the danger posed by synthetic opioids had reached a level where anyone who used illicit drugs, including “occasional MDMA at a festival”, should carry the opioid overdose treatment naloxone, which is free at pharmacies.
“In my mind, it genuinely has got to that point,” she said. “Because it’s not just that people are having some bad experiences. People are dying.”
Jauncey’s warning comes after NSW parliament passed a motion on Wednesday, supported by the opposition and the government, to formally recognise nitazenes as a “growing threat”.
Jauncey said the government should put the same energy and effort into preparing a public health response to nitazenes that they would a pandemic.
“I’ve been in public health for 25 or more years. Everybody knows about flu pandemic planning, because even though the risk seems really small, the potential impact is so horrendous,” she said.
“I would say we’re in a similar position with nitazenes, although the risk of significant impact from nitazenes is not tiny … at all.”
Jauncey wasn’t aware of any clients of the Uniting medically supervised injecting centre in Kings Cross using drugs there that were tainted with nitazenes.
“But that begs the question, ‘How would we know?’,” she said.
The centre’s only capacity for drug-checking was in the event of somebody having an “unusual, unexpected, or really severe” overdose, in which case they could send any leftover substance for testing, she said.
Jauncey urged the government to introduce drug-checking services to allow people who used drugs to test their substances before taking them.
The centre trialled drug-checking for six months this year through a research project run by Uniting and drug-checking advocacy and research centre The Loop, in partnership with the University of New South Wales. The findings are yet to be released.
The premier, Chris Minns, has said his government will not make a decision on a drug-checking policy until after the drug summit later this year.
The health minister, Ryan Park, said the government was concerned about nitazenes and it “continues to embrace a comprehensive range of existing measures geared towards awareness, prevention and harm minimisation”.
Jauncey said MPs should approach the summit in good faith and act on the resulting policy recommendations rather than saying “we’ll kick the can down the road”.
