Regional Victoria leading location for accidental pill fatalities

As accidental overdose deaths skyrocket, new research has uncovered the regional medical centres throughout the state which are perscribing strong drugs to Victorians.

Regional Victorians are being prescribed strong opioid-based pain killers and anti-anxiety drugs at record rates, with overdose deaths more than doubling in Bendigo and quadrupling in the Latrobe Valley over a decade.

Accidental overdose deaths have also skyrocketed in other regional centres including Shepparton, Geelong, Warrnambool and Frankston in recent years.

It comes as health data prepared specially for the Sunday Herald Sun reveals Geelong doctors hand out the most opioid-based painkiller prescriptions in the country, at a script every three minutes.

Strong opiod-based painkillers and anti-anxiety drugs are being perscribed at record rates.

Geelong is followed closely in Victoria by the Mornington Peninsula, Frankston and the Latrobe Valley, whose doctors prescribe opioids every 3.8, 4.4 and 5.7 minutes respectively, according to the data, drawn from the Australian Atlas of Healthcare Variation.

A major drug report by the Penington Institute, released late last month, shows overdose deaths from pharmaceutical opioids increased in regional Victoria from 17 to 39 from 2011 to 2017, with a peak in 2016 of 48 deaths.

But it is benzodiazepines - commonly called benzos and used to treat anxiety and as a sleeping aid -which have cause the greatest harm in regional Victoria in recent years, with deaths tripling from 20 in 2011 to 60 in 2017.

Sedatives Valium and Xanax are among the most well-known brands of benzodiazepines.

According to the recently-released Penington report benzodiazepines are frequently combined with other drugs to form a potentially toxic cocktail.

A 2017 Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) report shows multiple drugs were detected in nearly 60 per cent of unintentional drug deaths.

Penington chief John Ryan said the rate of deaths involving pharmaceutical opioids and benzodiazepines was increasing more rapidly in regional Victoria than in metropolitan Melbourne.

“You’re more than twice as likely to die of an unintentional drug overdose in regional Victoria today than in 2012. This points to a massive failure to provide the kind of services and interventions that we know save lives,” he said.

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Mr Ryan said 130 men and women living in regional Victoria died from unintentional overdoses in 2017.

“This surge in unintentional overdose deaths means that, today, people living in regional Victoria are more vulnerable than any other geographic population in Australia to unintentional overdose death,” he said.

It follows Sunday Herald Sun revelations that nearly 18,500 calls were made to the Austin Hospital’s Victorian Poisons Information Centre (VPIC) last year in relation to poisoning fears in children under the age of 14.

More than 15,500 of those calls related to children under the age of four, and suspected accidental diazepam overdose was among the top reasons for calls.

Diazepam is one of the most commonly prescribed medications in the benzodiazepine class of drug.

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