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Meet our supermarket junkies
By Mark Schliebs
July 28, 2008 10:00am
Supermarket junkies are legally buying powerful opiates straight off store shelves to brew "poppy seed tea" which provides a 12-hour high, a NEWS.com.au investigation has found.
Australians who drink the tea claim the best poppy seeds can be found at wholesalers, but many big-name supermarkets often have good "batches".
"Poppy seed tea is very much like morphine and a hell of a lot cheaper," a 19-year-old Brisbane user said.
A 17-year-old user from Adelaide said if "you do this right, you get f**ked up… This is the best high I’ve had for such a small price".
NEWS.com.au’s investigations have uncovered a subculture of supermarket drug addicts exploiting lax rules and regulations to develop habits with side-effects as deadly as illegal street drugs.
Our inquiries have found:
* Legal opiates on sale in many supermarkets across the country.
* Claims that retirees are recruited to cruise pharmacies as "pseudo-runners" for chemicals needed to make drugs like speed and ice.
* "Doctor shopping" rife with quarterly surveys showing up to 45,000 Australians going from doctor to doctor to obtain prescriptions for powerful drugs with minimal warnings from Medicare.
Enlarge Drugs in Australia: Our in-depth interactive
Poppy seed tea drinkers have told NEWS.com.au enough morphine or codeine can be extracted from the seeds to achieve a high that lasts well over 12 hours.
"To me, using many different drugs is like being a wine connoisseur – tasting many different varieties, learning the subtle differences between drugs that are similar and, of course, having favourites that I seek out and always return to," said one user, known as Yosef.
There is "a huge variation in the active ingredients (in supermarket poppy seeds)… which are opiates," says Professor Steve Allsop, director of the National Drug Research Institute.
"It's not common, but there have been cases where consumers have become addicted," he said.
Others have warned an addiction to poppy seed tea could be fatal.
One US user’s father, known as Tom, created the "Poppy Seed Tea Can Kill You" website with his wife after his 17-year-old son died of a morphine and codeine overdose after drinking the tea.
"It is really amazing to me that one of the most controlled substances out there - morphine - is in a way readily available to kids... at the supermarket," Tom has said.
In Australia there are no restrictions on the chemicals contained in poppy seeds, according to regulatory body Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ).
Inquiries to the federal Health Department were not returned.
Gateway drug
After five out of 24 patients at a drug clinic admitted their main source of opiates was from poppy seeds, health officials in New Zealand decided that the tea could be used to wean addicts off heroin.
"(Poppy seed tea) could be considered favourably within harm reduction philosophies, because of its low cost, legal availability and oral route of administration," the officials wrote in the Drug and Alcohol Review in May, 2007.
But the researchers also said the tea could also act as a "gateway drug" that could lead to opiate dependence.
RMIT medical expert Marc Cohen believes any addiction to poppy seed tea would not be comparable to a heroin dependency. "I don’t know that a heroin addict would be able to sustain themselves on poppy seeds," he said.
Colette McGrath, the clinical services manager at Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross, said she had heard of the tea being used by heroin addicts.
However users, along with medical experts, say the amount of opiates contained in poppy seeds depends on the batch and brand. Many users have sworn off the seeds because of this variability.
Doctor-shopping
Experts warned there were more reliable methods used to score drugs – including from doctors.
Prescription medicines like benzodiazepines (including Valium) and morphine are being routinely and easily obtained by "doctor-shoppers" who are scoring the same medicine from a range of different GPs.
Medicare told NEWS.com.au that Australia's GPs were only warned about a small fraction of people it identifies as doctor-shoppers.
Medicare maintains a special database used to identify patients that seem to go from doctor to doctor, scoring prescriptions for powerful painkillers – but the government organisation admits that very few are ever brought to the attention of GPs.
"In any given quarter, the number of patients identified under the program’s criteria range from 15,000 to 45,000 nationally," a Medicare spokeswoman said.
"It is not possible – nor necessary – to contact all of these patients or their doctors. Medicare only provides notification regarding the highest risk patients – about 5 per cent of those identified."
Once the alerts go out to the appropriate medical clinics, it is up to individual doctors to decide if a patient should receive any more prescriptions.
Widespread misuse
A Victorian parliamentary inquiry into the misuse of medicines said doctor shoppers accounted for up to 20 per cent of all Australian prescriptions for certain medicines.
"'Doctor shoppers' account for significant proportions of all the prescriptions filled on the PBS for benzodiazepines and narcotic analgesics, including almost one in five prescriptions filled for injectable formulations of morphine and pethidine," the inquiry found.
A doctor-shopper from Melbourne who would visit four GPs a day told the inquiry it was hard work scoring prescriptions – but she thought it was worth it.
"It was like I had a full-time job – 24 hours a day, seven days a week of going through the Yellow Pages," she said. "I spread out as far as I could go and then I would repeat some sort of format to go back to those doctors and around again and again."
The NDRI's Professor Allsop said any vulnerability in systems such as the Medicare doctor-shopping program and the anti-amphetamine making Project STOP would be quickly recognised.
"If there’s a weak link in the system, people will exploit it," Professor Allsop said.
Pharmacist and author Gail Bell agrees. After several years of dealing with people looking to score drugs from her pharmacy on the NSW Central Coast, she has noticed a significant change: they are getting older and are losing their shadiness.
Pseudo-runners
Ms Bell says retired people are being paid to buy chemicals used to make drugs such as ice and speed. "What I’m noticing is the usual daggy (and) edgy-looking pseudo-runner that we were seeing years ago have disappeared because they stand out a mile away now," Ms Bell said.
"What surprised me more than anything was learning that most of the pseudo-runners up here are recruited from the clubs, and they’re usually either retired or semi-retired.
"They’re probably the most invisible people in the community: a middle-aged person in a cardigan asking for some pseudoephedrine doesn’t ring anybody’s bells."
She claims drug makers are hanging around the poker machine areas of clubs, seeking out potential "pseudo-runners". "They just ask people if they want to make some easy money by doing shopping for them," Ms Bell said.
"They quite happily hand over their drivers licences (at the pharmacy)… whether they use their own once or they’re supplied with fake drivers licences by their employers, I don’t know."
A New South Wales police spokesperson said "so-called 'pseudo-runners' are not dominated by any one demographic".
The Project STOP system, developed and maintained by Shaun Singleton from the Pharmacy Guild of Queensland, records every driver’s license number used to by pseudoephedrine. Other forms of ID are recorded and cross-referenced on a database to check whether multiple purchases are being made.
In many states, identification is not necessary to make the purchase, but the pharmacist can decide to refuse to sell the drug to a certain person.
"The most targeted drug in Australia is only denied about 3 per cent of the time," Project STOP's Mr Singleton said. "That means 97 per cent of people (who) come into a pharmacy and ask for a product, leave with it."
Around 6500 transactions are recorded in the system each day.
'We need help'
When NEWS.com.au first reported that thousands of Australians had become addicted to over-the-counter painkillers such as Nurofen Plus, many users wrote in to share their experiences.
"I started out taking Nurofen Plus for pain over five years ago, today I am an addict," a Perth woman said.
"I am a normal person and I still function but it has got to the stage where I could have done serious damage to my body. I have now gone to a doctor for help and have to have tests done. I have a huge task ahead of me to get rid of this curse."
Another said: "I've never been addicted to anything, let alone pain killers… so believe me when I say I did become addicted to Nurofen Plus whilst suffering from terrible pain last year.
"It was the only thing that worked, but even after the pain was gone, I found it hard to stop. Without the pain, the drug had a calming effect and was similar to that of some recreational drugs."
The National Drugs and Poisons Schedule Committee (NDPSC) said the story and subsequent coverage "highlighted a range of issues relating to the misuse and addiction potential of this product in Australia and the UK".
Earlier this month, the NDPSC made a decision regarding the availability of drugs containing codeine and the anti-inflammatory ibuprofen.
The decision has yet to be made public.
News.com.au
