Experts push for action to prepare Australia for influx of lethal opioid fentanyl

Australia is not ready to combat a potential opioid epidemic, experts have warned. Here’s what needs to be done.

Australia is not ready to combat an influx of the opioid that is the leading killer of Americans aged 18 to 45, experts have warned in the wake of a record seizure on our shores.

Authorities last week blocked a “frankly outrageous” criminal bid to import 11kg of pure fentanyl from Canada to Melbourne – the equivalent of more than five million potentially lethal doses of a drug that is 50 times stronger than heroin.

Monash Addiction Research Centre deputy director Professor Suzanne Nielsen said it needed to serve as a wake-up call to strengthen Australia’s fentanyl defences, given there was already a large opioid dependent population similar to the US.

She called for more supervised injecting rooms, pill testing, enhanced treatment programs and expanded supplies of naloxone, a drug that can overturn overdoses.

Just two milligrams of fentanyl can kill within minutes.

In the US, fentanyl poisoning is the leading cause of death among those aged 18 to 45 – higher than Covid, suicide and gun crime – and claimed more than 60,000 lives last year.

Portraits of fentanyl overdose victims displayed at America’s Drug Enforcement Administration headquarters. Picture: AFP

According to Australia’s latest wastewater drug monitoring report, fentanyl use remained “low and relatively stable”. Regional consumption was the lowest on record last December.

But Prof Nielsen said that if illicit supplies became dominant in the Australian market, that would cause “similarly devastating effects” to the United States.

“This has been a looming threat for five years now, but we still aren’t quite ready to react as fast as we need to make sure that if this becomes a reality, that we can prevent those drug-related deaths that have been seen in the United States,” she told News Corp.

Last week, families of fentanyl overdose victims across the US marked the first annual national prevention and awareness day, and called on President Joe Biden to declare a national emergency.

“The current rate of fentanyl deaths is equal to a 9/11-type event every two weeks,” they said in their petition.

An event in Colorado – where fentanyl overdose deaths have soared by a whopping 1008 per cent in six years – was led by Andrea Thomas, whose daughter died in 2018 after taking half a counterfeit pill for pain relief.

Drug Enforcement Administration boss Anne Milgram said fentanyl was “the single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered”.

While it is used legitimately to treat severe pain including among cancer sufferers, fentanyl is also found in counterfeit opioid prescription pills sold on the black market and mixed with other illicit drugs.

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Originally published as Experts push for action to prepare Australia for influx of lethal opioid fentanyl