Half a pill was enough to kill Jetson. Now this drug is infiltrating supply

Jetson Gordon was having trouble sleeping. Anxious thoughts had been keeping him awake since he moved to Melbourne from Mullumbimby, near Byron Bay, a month before.

Being alone in a new city after moving from a small country town was challenging. He missed his family and friends, and he desperately wanted to impress his new boss at the carpentry apprenticeship he had started.

Oxycodone, a semisynthetic prescription opioid used to treat pain, seemed like an easy enough solution to help him relax and get a good night’s sleep, so the teenager ordered what he thought was a shipment of pills online.

The tablets looked exactly the way they were supposed to – small, light blue pills with an imprinted M on one side and the number 30 on the other.

Stashed inside a resealable black plastic bag, they had made their way to Australia inside a padded envelope from the UK through the postal system.

But within hours of swallowing half a pill, the “caring, trusting, and loving” teenager was dead.

Jetson’s flatmate, Lachlan Young, found his body the following morning, after noticing Jetson had not got up for his shift.

The night before, Jetson had sat around a fire outside with his flatmates and spoken about how excited he was to head to work the following day. He had gone to bed early to get a good sleep.

“I opened the door, and I was like: ‘Jetson, Jetty, wake up, mate. What are you doing here? Jetty!’ and he wasn’t saying anything,” Young remembers.

As he approached the bed and touched Jetson’s neck, Young realised something was terribly wrong and called triple zero.

“I think my friend’s dead. You need to come now,” he told the operator. “You have to tell me how to do CPR.”

Young scooped up the teenager and desperately tried to resuscitate him as he waited for an ambulance to arrive, but he could not be saved.

“I’ll never forget the feeling of holding a dead body.”

The pills that Jetson had bought online were counterfeit painkillers that had been laced with an extremely potent synthetic opioid that has been linked to hundreds of deaths overseas and is increasingly being detected in mail shipments coming into Australia – nitazenes.

Nitazenes have been linked to the deaths of 22 people in Victoria since 2021. The drug is suspected of being behind the fatal overdose of teen dad Abdul El Sayed and three others inside a house in Broadmeadows last June. The group thought they were taking cocaine, but the drugs were contaminated with a synthetic opioid. A coronial investigation into the deaths is ongoing.

Fatal overdoses and hospital admissions have also been recorded in South Australia, Queensland and NSW, but the total number of Australians who have died from the drug is unknown.

Forensic testing across different states and territories is also inconsistent, and the data on Australia’s national coronial database is about 18 months old.

Jetson Gordon had just moved to Melbourne and was excited about his carpentry apprenticeship.

Researchers, health experts and law enforcement agencies have repeatedly warned about the infiltration of nitazenes into Australia’s drug supply. They believe the drug, which is routinely cut into other substances, could lead to a wave of overdoses and pose a greater threat to Australia than the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which has led to more than 100,000 deaths in the US but does not have a strong presence here.

With the supply of heroin expected to dry up in the next year as a result of the Taliban regime’s ban on the cultivation of opium poppy in Afghanistan, drug experts worry the use of synthetic opioids such as nitazenes will explode as criminal networks seek to satiate Australia’s endless appetite for drugs with cheaper alternatives. Before the ban, about 80 per cent of the world’s heroin supply could be traced back to the poppy fields in Afghanistan.

Jetson’s mother, who asked not to be named to be able to grieve privately, said she was happy for Jetson when he decided to move to Melbourne. He was starting his own journey and had a lifetime ahead.

“What I didn’t realise was that he was a bit naive.”

The mother, who recently returned from Canada and the United States where she witnessed how these new drugs are infiltrating and disrupting communities, said she wanted people to be informed.

The deadly drug ‘made in China’

For nearly two years after Jetson’s death in April 2022, all that his father, John Gordon, wanted to do was to stand on every coffee table across Australia and talk about what happened to his son. The type of nitazene that killed Jetson was 28 times more powerful than fentanyl and 1000 times more potent than morphine. This deadly drug he had never heard of was out there, mixed in with other substances and hidden in counterfeit pills sold openly on the internet. This could happen to anyone, anywhere.

“It’s not the dark web. It’s not this complicated way of getting it. It’s not hanging out behind a pub car park buying illicit drugs. It’s at the tip of your keyboard, and anyone can do it. It’s not age-restricted. It’s easy as,” John said.

Nitazenes and drug manufacturing paraphernalia found by South Australian Police in 2024.

That’s a concern shared by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC). Unlike drugs such as methamphetamine and cocaine which come into Australia in container loads through ports, nitazenes largely enter the country in letter-sized envelopes. The potent, deadly drug is mixed in with painkillers that anyone can order online (illegally, but found through a simple Google search) and get delivered to their home address without the need for a crime syndicate to be involved. It can also be shipped in its pure form or mixed with other substances.

“What you’re looking at is letters and parcels with grams or even fractions of a gram of this substance, which can be equally deadly,” ACIC principal drug adviser Shane Neilson said. “What that means is that there are far more importers potentially than there are for methylamphetamine and cocaine.”

Health authorities in Australia have detected nitazenes in oxycodone tablets, vape liquid, veterinary tranquiliser xylazine (also known by the street name “tranq”), and in popular party drugs such as cocaine and ketamine. In the UK and Ireland, where there’s been a wave of nitazene overdoses since the pandemic, the synthetic opioid has also been found in heroin.

A fraction of a gram is enough to kill, but Neilson said most people who consumed the drug were unaware that they were taking it. Hospital emergency data collected by the Emerging Drug Network of Australia shows that of 32 patients who presented to hospital for nitazene toxicity between July 2020 and February 2024, almost half were unaware they had taken an opioid at all. Five patients had knowingly taken nitazenes, while the rest believed they had consumed another opioid.

“These are major things that concern us,” Neilson said.

Intelligence collected by the ACIC suggests nitazenes are overwhelmingly being produced in pharmaceutical and chemical companies in China before being shipped to Australia or intermediary countries like the US and the UK. That is despite Chinese law banning the production of the substance.

The US select committee on the Chinese Communist Party has previously accused the Chinese government of subsidising companies exporting synthetic narcotics and advertising for sale the precursor chemicals used to manufacture fentanyl, a claim that China denies.

“It’s vexing a range of agencies around the world because clearly the product is leaving China in breach of the legislation in that country,” Nielson said.

This masthead found at least two websites openly selling nitazenes online. One site, connected to a Chinese pharmaceutical company sanctioned by the US for selling illicit drugs, offered customers the option of purchasing protonitazenes via texting app WhatsApp. Another, based in India’s Gujarat region, also listed the substance for sale alongside prescription drug Xanax. The Indian site even featured a review from a customer purporting to be Australian who claimed to have successfully purchased counterfeit pills.

Who exactly sent the pills that killed Jetson and where they sourced them from is unclear. Only two details on the envelope were legible: the initials of the sender (PJ) and the declared contents of the parcel (cosmetics).

Detectives investigating the teenager’s death kept his laptop and mobile phone for almost a year, but no search of the devices was conducted to find out where he had bought the pills from. Investigators told the family trying to track down the suppliers was like looking for “a needle in a haystack”.

“The detective said to us that it’s up to the coroner to see what they want to do with it. Following Jetson’s coronial inquiry, the coroner decided not to pursue it,” John said.

A cat-and-mouse game with clandestine chemists

The appearance of nitazenes is part of an emerging pattern within the illicit drug market, in which very potent new drugs pop up seemingly out of nowhere overnight, sending scientists such as Associate Professor Jennifer Schumann on a mad race to detect them.

“It’s a bit of a cat-and-mouse game,” Schumann, the head of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine’s drug intelligence unit, said.

Associate Professor Jennifer Schumann heads the drug intelligence unit at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. Credit: Chris Hopkins

Scientists working for the Swiss chemical company CIBA Aktiengesellschaft, in Basel, created nitazenes in the late 1950s. Scientists in Europe had been on a quest since World War II to develop a synthetic opioid that could treat severe pain without having to extract the chemicals from an opium poppy.

German chemists, driven by fears morphine supplies would run out during the war, had successfully developed a mild analgesic to treat wounded troops known as pethidine in the 1930s. Less than a decade later, they had created yet another synthetic opioid compound called Hoechst-10820 – the opioid dependence treatment drug methadone.

But nitazenes were so potent (Alexander Shulgin, godfather of popular party drug MDMA, warned about their potential for devastation in 1975) that they were never commercialised, and eventually fell into oblivion.

That is until about 2019, when chemists at the clandestine labs making illicit drugs for organised crime groups began digging up old pharmacology records looking for potent substances discovered the existence of nitazenes, and began feeding them into the drug supply.

Schumann was the first to detect them in Australia in 2021. She has since been researching their prevalence in the community and ways in which authorities can prevent a catastrophic wave of overdoses. One of the main obstacles she has stumbled upon is a glaring gap in real-time data.

A plaque in memory of Jetson Gordon in Mullumbimby.Credit: Danielle Smith

The National Coronial Information System, a database of coronial findings from around the nation, contains information only about closed cases. This means information from the database could be several years old and grossly underestimate the real number of people who have died from a specific drug.

Wastewater analysis results, another helpful tool used by health authorities to monitor drug trends, are released only three times a year. So far, the only wastewater analysis that has published results on nitazenes was conducted by the University of Queensland and detected two types of nitazenes during one week of testing over New Year’s in 2022-23 and 2023-24.

It’s a source of frustration for families like Jetson’s, who believe the information gap is contributing to the death toll.

“As far as we’re concerned, we’re two years behind the eight-ball. How many people have died? We don’t know,” John said.

That’s where Schumann comes in. The associate professor is the forensic lead for Victoria at the Emerging Drugs Network of Australia, a network of experts from across Australia that collect data on illicit drug use by analysing blood samples taken at hospital emergency departments nationwide.

Instead of waiting for months for a toxicology report, the team fast-tracks the testing to get a result within two weeks. The idea is to catch emerging drugs as they enter the market and prevent deaths.

Detectives and forensic officers at the scene of the suspected nitazene overdose in Broadmeadows last June.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

“Until now, all of our responses to these sorts of drugs has been detecting the harm after it’s occurred,” Schumann said. “Surveillance, monitoring, public health responses and alerts is really the most proactive way to prevent it, and to do that we need to have information from all these different data sources.”

Scientists such as Schumann want forensic testing to be standardised across Australia and support for toxicology labs to systemically screen for high-potency opioids and other emerging drugs such as nitazenes. They also want drug-checking services to be expanded so people can make informed choices about whether to take their drugs outside of music events and festivals.

ACT, Queensland and Victoria all have drug-checking services in place (although the Queensland government is considering scrapping the service). NSW introduced a pill-testing trial at music festivals in early 2025.

The pocket-sized lifeline

It is unclear how much time passed between Jetson swallowing the contaminated pill and when he died, but it could have been a matter of minutes.

Nitazenes are a highly lipophilic drug, which means they are absorbed by the brain and other fat-rich tissues faster than opiates such as morphine. Because of their potency and fast-acting nature, they profoundly slow down breathing, quickly starving the brain of oxygen and causing death.

“A heroin overdose is often about 25 minutes, where someone goes into an overdose state slowly, and you’ve got time to intervene,” Professor Suzanne Nielsen, the deputy director of the Monash Addiction Research Centre, said.

“For nitazenes and fentanyl, what we often see is you might be talking about two to three minutes, so you don’t have a lot of time to respond.”

Those experiencing an overdose may appear unresponsive or drowsy, breathe shallowly and display pinpoint pupils.

Nyxoid is a brand of naloxone that is a nasal spray that blocks or reverses the effects of opioid drugs.Credit: AP

Nielsen believes it could be only a matter of time before Australia sees a spike in overdoses linked to the drug as more players try to enter the illicit trade.

She said authorities should prepare for a potentially highly toxic opioid market by investing in death prevention measures such as drug-checking and the opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone.

The nasal spray can short-circuit the overdose process by blocking the opioid receptors in the brain, so the drugs can no longer activate them. It is already used to reverse heroin and fentanyl overdoses and can be accessed for free over the counter at more than half of Australia’s pharmacies.

Jetson’s family wants the federal government to expand the $19.6 million program to include home delivery so the stigma around having to go to the pharmacy in person doesn’t deter people from accessing the life-saving drug, particularly in small country towns where there might only be one chemist.

Schumann, who is also a strong naloxone advocate, says most recreational users should consider carrying naloxone on them, regardless of whether they intend to take an opioid or a party drug such as MDMA, ketamine or cocaine.

“If you’re not having an opioid overdose, and you use naloxone, it’s going to do absolutely no harm. That’s the good thing about it,” Schumann said.

Nita-what?

The first reaction when Lachlan Young, Jetson’s former flatmate, speaks with young people about nitazenes is often a question: what is that?

“Everyone’s well aware of fentanyl. So then when you compare its potency to such a potent drug like fentanyl, people get quite blown away,” he said.

Young works as a residential youth worker in a rehab facility run by the Youth Support + Advocacy Service (YSAS) that helps youth struggling with mental health and substance abuse issues in Melbourne get back on their feet. He believes Australia is facing an epidemic of poor mental health, which leads to people self-medicating with illicit substances.

The 23-year-old had been toying with the idea of becoming a youth worker for a while, but it wasn’t until Jetson’s death and the unexpected overdose of another close friend, when he watched their families crumble in front of his eyes, that he decided to embark on a mission to prevent others from dying.

“For me, there were two options. I could take the easy way out and self-medicate or confront the issue and do something about it,” he said.

Young believes awareness around drugs such as nitazenes is crucial to prevent overdoses.

It’s a view shared by Jetson’s father, John, and stepmother, Emily Berry, who hope Jetson’s premature death won’t be in vain.

The couple keep a supply of naloxone spray in their first aid kit and encourage anyone who will listen to do the same, particularly if they live with their children.

“There are many ways you can skin the cat, but for us, Jetson died accidentally from this horrid drug, and we were all unaware that it even existed,” Emily said.

“Awareness is linked to helping prevent deaths – that’s the simplicity of it.”

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