poledriver
Bluelighter
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- Jul 21, 2005
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Australia's Drug Death Rate Is Now 10 Times Higher Than Portugal's
On Friday last week, news broke that Canberra music festival Spilt Milk wouldn't push ahead with playing host to Australia's first legal, professional pill testing service. For drug reform advocates, it came as a shock. Doctors and activists have been campaigning for years to get a pilot like this off the ground in Australia, with little luck—despite the fact similar services are common across Europe and even the US.
In 2017, harm minimisation is seemingly still too politically toxic in Australia. Forget safe injecting rooms or following Portugal's widely-cited example and decriminalising drugs, we can't even get pill testing over the line. And perhaps that's why the country's drug-induced death rate just hit its highest level since the heroin epidemic of the late 1990s.
Right now, Australia's drug death rate is sitting at 7.5 deaths per 100,000 people. By comparison, the death rate in Europe is 18 deaths for every million people. Portugal, where drugs were decriminalised in 2001, sees just 0.58 drug deaths per 100,000 people.That's a tenth of what we're currently seeing in Australia. So, what's going wrong here?
Well, one key thing to note is that what is driving Australian drug deaths has changed since 1999. Back then, the country was in the midst of a heroin glut and as harm minimisation campaigner Will Tregoning explains, a lot of people were using heroin in combination with benzodiazepines, such sleeping pills.
"It's a risky combination," Tregoning says. "And rates of overdose deaths were high." In essence, 1999 was an outlier. Instead the common theme that emerges when you look a little deeper at Australia's drug deaths, both in the 1990s and today, is benzodiazepines.
Today, while the heroin epidemic has abated, benzos remain present as ever in the drug-induced death data. In fact, benzos and other opioids—including oxycodone and codeine—were present in nearly 70 percent of drug-induced deaths in Australia in 2016.
Cont -
https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/...igher-than-portugals?utm_source=vicefblocalau
On Friday last week, news broke that Canberra music festival Spilt Milk wouldn't push ahead with playing host to Australia's first legal, professional pill testing service. For drug reform advocates, it came as a shock. Doctors and activists have been campaigning for years to get a pilot like this off the ground in Australia, with little luck—despite the fact similar services are common across Europe and even the US.
In 2017, harm minimisation is seemingly still too politically toxic in Australia. Forget safe injecting rooms or following Portugal's widely-cited example and decriminalising drugs, we can't even get pill testing over the line. And perhaps that's why the country's drug-induced death rate just hit its highest level since the heroin epidemic of the late 1990s.
Right now, Australia's drug death rate is sitting at 7.5 deaths per 100,000 people. By comparison, the death rate in Europe is 18 deaths for every million people. Portugal, where drugs were decriminalised in 2001, sees just 0.58 drug deaths per 100,000 people.That's a tenth of what we're currently seeing in Australia. So, what's going wrong here?
Well, one key thing to note is that what is driving Australian drug deaths has changed since 1999. Back then, the country was in the midst of a heroin glut and as harm minimisation campaigner Will Tregoning explains, a lot of people were using heroin in combination with benzodiazepines, such sleeping pills.
"It's a risky combination," Tregoning says. "And rates of overdose deaths were high." In essence, 1999 was an outlier. Instead the common theme that emerges when you look a little deeper at Australia's drug deaths, both in the 1990s and today, is benzodiazepines.
Today, while the heroin epidemic has abated, benzos remain present as ever in the drug-induced death data. In fact, benzos and other opioids—including oxycodone and codeine—were present in nearly 70 percent of drug-induced deaths in Australia in 2016.
Cont -
https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/...igher-than-portugals?utm_source=vicefblocalau
