Police have issued a major warning about the circulation of potentially deadly illicit drugs in Canberra following four overdose deaths in the past two months.
ACT police suspect high levels of drug purity or the addition of dangerous synthetic opioids such as fentanyl or nitazenes are responsible for the deaths in the nation’s capital.
The latest cases in the cluster include a man and a woman who died in separate incidents on Thursday, as well as two others in the past two months.
Police have yet to determine the exact causes of the overdoses.
ACT Police Acting Superintendent Dave Craft said synthetic opioids have been identified in the ACT as recently as May this year.
“As police focus on dismantling drug suppliers who deliberately cause harm and misery to our community, we want to raise awareness of this issue,” he said.
‘We encourage illicit drug users to adopt harm minimisation practices and protect themselves from these harmful substances currently in circulation.
‘There is no safe use of drugs, however we understand that drug addiction is a health problem.
The latest deaths include a man and a woman who died in separate incidents on Thursday, as well as two others in the past two months.
‘In light of recent overdoses that police have responded to, we urge those who use drugs to do so in the safest way possible.’
Superintendent Craft said officers had responded to incidents where people had died overnight, losing consciousness in the middle of the night and not being discovered until the following morning.
He said he did not want to see any more preventable deaths in the community.
ACT Police said drugs can be tested at CanTEST – a free and confidential chemical analysis of pills and drugs intended for personal use.
Earlier this year, a 60 Minutes programme exposed the danger behind nitazenes and how they ended up in the hands of vulnerable people.
Nitazenes are a highly potent synthetic opioid developed in the 1950s, but their potency meant they never made it into pharmacies.
In the programme, experts revealed that anything from MDMA to cocaine, counterfeit painkillers and even vapes could be laced with the deadly substance.
Twenty deaths related to nitazene have already been recorded in Australia, as well as dozens of overdoses.
Police have issued a major warning about the circulation of potentially deadly illicit drugs in Canberra following four overdose deaths in the past two months.
Health authorities have issued multiple warnings about the dangerous drug, with one from NSW Health in November linking a death to nitazenes found in black market vaping liquids, which are used to refill vaporizers.
In May, NSW Health issued a warning after four people in Sydney overdosed and were hospitalised from nitazenes.
A month earlier, 20 people overdosed in the Blue Mountains area of Nepean, where nitazene was found in people who believed they were using heroin.
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