False narratives still used to explain our so many overdose deaths
1 July 2024
Drug Free Australia is criticising the early preview of Australian overdose deaths released yesterday by Melbourne’s Penington Institute which said that the roughly 2,300 deaths for 2023 represented a Boeing 737 loss of life every month in this country, while obliquely hinting that harm reduction programming would save many of these lives.
“What is very clear from this preliminary data,” said Gary Christian, President of Drug Free Australia, “is that most overdose deaths are not, as the false narrative used to go, from criminals mixing talcum dust with heroin and creating unknown purity and toxic contamination, but rather, as the Institute clearly admits, from pharmaceuticals where the purity, strength and dose is standardised and where they also admit that many of the deaths are not amongst established illicit drug users.”
Drug Free Australia is critical of claims in the ABC news story that many of these deaths are from pharmaceuticals like benzodiazepines being produced in criminal labs, saying that the onus of proof of such claims is on those making them, given the false narratives that were similarly used with heroin for so many decades. The most authoritative and official Australian study on heroin overdoses by the Federal Government’s ANCD found negligible deaths in Australia from contaminants or unknown purity. Such false claims were always used to justify calls for more government harm reduction spending or alternately, to justify the regulation (legalisation) of dangerous drugs like heroin.
The other false narrative that many of the deaths are from the inordinate potency of illicit fentanyl and even more potent nitazenes require much more proof. The last Penington Institute report on overdose deaths up to 2022 clearly showed that our opiate overdose deaths are mostly not from the more powerful fentanyl within Australia, simply because those deaths are minimal (Figure 34) compared to what has always caused opiate deaths from the beginning – polydrug use, particularly where opiates are used with other depressants like alcohol and benzodiazepines.
Similarly, the deaths of four Melbourne men from protonitazenes in June last year are questionably cited as proof that these were sold as cocaine because a rolled foreign bill was used to snort the substance. What this suggestion ignores is that the most prominent US mode of administration for fatal fentanyl and associated opiate deaths in recent (p 128) years has been snorting.
“The only answer to these out-of-control deaths is what worked so well during the Federal Tough on Drugs era between 1998 and 2007, where deaths plummeted by two thirds for almost all those years because of vastly increased rehabilitation and prevention programming,” said Mr Christian.
Contact: Gary Christian 0422 163 141