Drug overdose deaths in the ACT have reached 15 in just nine months this year, compared with nine for the full calendar year of 2023.
Four people have died from suspected overdoses in the past two months, including a man and a woman in separate incidents on August 29.
While the cause of the suspected overdose deaths is still under investigation, police have noted a rise in two specific synthetic opioids of concern, fentanyl and nitazene.
In late May, federal police and Border Force issued a joint public warning over concerns that more nitazene could be hitting Australian streets.
Authorities identified nitazene, an illicit and dangerous synthetic opioid considered to be equally or more potent than fentanyl, in a series of air and mail cargo detections at the Australian border last year.
ABF officers identified 22 detections of suspected nitazene imports within postal packages sent to Australia via mail cargo, originating from the United Kingdom in October, 2023.
From these detections, the AFP seized a total of 742 tablets confirmed to contain metonitazene. Prior to this, there have only been two other instances of the synthetic opioid detected by ABF.
Fentanyl had been one of the key emerging drugs of concern for Australian authorities, given the harm that it has caused in the US and that overseas, serious and organised crime networks were looking to find fresh markets for the drug.
Fentanyl led to the overdose deaths of more than 74,000 people in the United States in 2023.
The Chief Police Officer of the ACT, Scott Lee, told ABC radio on Wednesday that the spike in ACT suspected overdose deaths and the rise in synthetics was of such concern that additional police resources, including the organised crime team, had been directed to "get ahead" of what was occurring on the streets, executing search warrants on potential suppliers.
He said that these dangerous synthetic opioids carried a high risk of addiction, breathing difficulties or respiratory failure, and death.
In May this year, the ACT's pill testing service CanTEST issued a red alert for a nitazene derivative, N-pyrrolidino protonitazene (NPP), which is thought to be 25 times more potent than fentanyl.
N-pyrrolidino protonitazene was first found in the United States in January 2023. It has since been reported in the UK and Oceania.
A report from the US Centre for Forensic Science Research and Education noted the synthetic opioid has the "potential to cause harm" and should be a "high public health concern globally".
