Teen jailed for importing ‘Dracula’ of drugs in the mail

A Perth teen has been jailed for importing elephant tranquilliser, with a judge saying she had never seen anything so dangerous.

A Perth teen has been jailed for importing elephant tranquilliser that can kill in tiny doses, with a judge saying she had never seen anything so dangerous.

The synthetic opioid carfentanyl is 100 times more potent than fentanyl, the powerful painkiller associated with waves of fatal overdoses globally through illicit use. It is 10,000 times more potent than morphine.

It began appearing in Australia three years ago. Doctors warn it has been cut into other drugs without users’ knowledge and the difference in dose between a “high” and death is negligible.

Federal prosecutors said the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had raided the home of a “dark web” vendor in Kelowna, British Columbia. They then tipped off the Australian Federal Police to a consignment ordered from Western Australia.

In a subsequent search of a home in the beachside Perth suburb of Scarborough in Augus­t 2017 the AFP found 121.76mg of carfentanyl. Just 0.02mg can cause a fatal overdose.

Jewel Griffiths, then 18, told police she received an envelope with powder she thought was drugs. She was going to mark it “return to sender”.

But AFP digital forensics offic­ers found advice on her device­s on using a different first name to order drugs to gain a “legal ­excuse”. They also found a list of drug types, including fentanyl and carfentanyl.

Griffiths was sentenced last month to nine months in jail for importing the drug with no commercial intent. She was to be release­d on a good behaviour order after five months. The office of the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions said District Court judge Amanda Burrows said at sentencing that the drug was “quite frankly frightening” and would likely have resulted in Griffiths’s death.

David Caldicott, emergency consultant and ANU College of Health and Medicine senior clinical lecturer, said carfentanyl was typically bought from China and sold over the internet.

It had been cut into heroin and other drugs to make them appear more potent. “If you think of the ­illicit fentanyls like a family of vampires, carfentanyl is Dracula,” Dr Caldicott said. “It’s not nearly as common as all the other minor fentanyls that are seeping into the illicit market but carfentanyl is definitely the most dangerous.”

He said the group of drugs needed­ attention: in Chicago, more people were being killed by opioids than by gunshots.