An inner west drug dealer who gave a sex worker so much fentanyl she was hospitalised has failed in his bid to reduce his sentence for drug supply because he wrongly believed the drug was cocaine.
Shadi Salameh, 32, and an associate visited Petersham’s The Gateway Club in January 2020.
Petersham’s The Gateway Club
The Gateway Club describes itself as Sydney’s longest-running legal brothel offering “ultimate pleasure”.
Salameh gave a sex worker a drink spiked with fentanyl at the Parramatta Road brothel, his District Court trial heard last year.
Fentanyl is the highly addictive synthetic opioid at the centre of the prescription painkiller epidemic that has devastated large rural swathes of the United States. It has so far had a minimal presence in NSW.
The sex worker called the club’s manager when she became distressed and disoriented, and Salameh fled.
Police searched his home several days later, seizing 175 grams of fentanyl from a sealed envelope and 3.8g from a plastic bag hidden in the wardrobe in his bedroom.
Anything more than five grams of fentanyl is considered to be large commercial supply under state drug legislation.
Investigators also seized $29,530 and 152g of cocaine from the home.
He was ultimately arrested and charged with causing a person to take an intoxicating substance to cause harm, dealing with the proceeds of crime and supplying both cocaine and fentanyl.
Salameh told detectives and continued to insist throughout his trial that he believed the drug was cocaine. He said he would not have allowed fentanyl into the home in which he lived with children.
He told the District Court in 2023 that he had never heard of fentanyl before his arrest and denied “doing a tester” on the sex worker by putting it in her drink.
Last year, he was convicted of drug supply and sentenced to at least four years.
He then launched an appeal on the grounds that he believed the substance was cocaine, not fentanyl.
Salameh, who had previously had a drug problem and was at a time paid in cocaine to store quantities of the drug, claimed that knowing the drug was fentanyl would have made him “more morally blameworthy and more objectively serious”.
Earlier this month, the state’s highest court allowed him to appeal his conviction but immediately dismissed the appeal.
A majority judgment from the Court of Criminal Appeal said: “We cannot accept that parliament intended a supplier of a commercial quantity of a prohibited drug could escape liability for that commercial supply if they incorrectly believed that the prohibited drug being supplied was another prohibited drug the commercial quantity of which was larger than the commercial quantity of the actual drug supplied.”
The court also denied Salameh’s appeal against the severity of his sentence. He will be eligible for parole in August 2026.