A DRUG overdose claims an Australian life every four hours according to a new report, coinciding with a call by Pope Francis to cast off our indifference to the crisis of drug addiction.
An annual report by public health research group Penington Institute shows that 2,231 drug-induced deaths were reported in Australia in 2021.
While the report is released this week, Pope Francis also drew attention to the scourge of drug addiction in a message to the 60th International Congress of Forensic Toxicologists in Rome on Sunday (August 27).
Pope Francis said we are called to act like Jesus and cannot be indifferent to the situations that lead people, especially adolescents, into drug addiction.
“Behind every addiction there are concrete experiences, stories of loneliness, inequality, exclusion, lack of integration,” he said. “Faced with these situations, we cannot be indifferent.”
The Penington Institute, says drug-induced deaths are a crisis requiring greater action from government.
Of particular note are anti-anxiety medications that are fast becoming one of the leading contributors to overdoses and are involved in more accidental deaths than alcohol, heroin or cocaine.
One in 20 Australians are prescribed benzodiazepines, such as Xanax and Valium.
The Penington Institute report found there were 544 unintentional drug-induced deaths involving benzodiazepines in 2021, making them the second-most common drug involved in an accidental overdose death behind opioids.
The proportion of accidental overdose deaths due to benzodiazepines has doubled in the past 20 years, making up 32.5 per cent of fatalities in 2021.
Opioids remain the number one killer for accidental overdoses, accounting for 47.5 per cent of all deaths.
Deaths linked to the synthetic opioid fentanyl were cited by the report as a major cause for concern after skyrocketing by more than 800 per cent since 2001.
Seven out of 10 unintentional drug overdose deaths in 2021 were men and Indigenous Australians were almost four times more likely to die under those circumstances than non-Indigenous Australians.
Rural and regional areas also had a slightly higher rate of unintentional drug-induced deaths than metropolitan centres.
The most common drug found in people’s systems was opioids, contributing to 45.7 per cent of overdose deaths in 2021.
The Penington Institute started producing the annual overdose report eight years ago to drive change, but CEO John Ryan said the response has been wholly inadequate compared to the scale of the problem.
“The time to address this national crisis is now,” he said.
“We already have the tools and know-how to reduce overdose deaths – we just need to do it by implementing evidence-based solutions, supporting access to treatment, and closing the gap in overdose death rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.”
In his message to toxicologists, Pope Francis drew attention to the problem of new psychoactive substances (NPS) — drugs designed to mimic established illegal drugs, such as cocaine, MDMA, and LSD, but made with different chemical structures to avoid bans.
NPS have a “rapidly expanding market and uncertain toxicological effects and serious public health consequences,” he said.
“The ease of chemically modifying such substances then enables organised crime to evade legal controls, making it more difficult to detect the illicit compounds.”
He said it is extremely important to develop treatment plans and ways of curbing the proliferation of NPS, especially because many young people abuse them without knowing their danger.
