‘Drug checking’, just like pill testing, is premised on the demonstrably incorrect inference that most drug-related deaths are tied to either unknown purity of drugs bought from criminals, or deadly contaminants or other toxic drugs mixed in with such purchased drugs.
For decades now, the same parties now requesting substantial government funding for ‘drug checking’ have been pushing the same spurious misinformation.
Here are the direct words from ANCD Research Paper 1 – ‘Heroin Overdose’ coming from the Prime Minister’s own Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD) in the year 2000. This paper was produced in the midst of Australia’s highest rates of opioid overdose.
On page xiii, under the heading ‘Purity’ the NDARC researchers assert,
“If overdose were a simple function of purity one would expect the blood morphine concentrations of fatal overdose victims to be significantly higher than living intoxicated heroin users. As described above, it has been found that many individuals who die of an opioid overdose have blood morphine concentrations at autopsy which are below the commonly accepted toxic dose. Studies that have investigated the relationship between the purity of street heroin seizures and fatality from overdose report a weak correlation, or no correlation, between heroin purity and fatality from overdose.”
Then on page xiv, under ‘Contaminants’ it reports,
“In general, studies outside the eastern United States do not report the detection of impurities in seized heroin. Adulterants found in Australian heroin samples are largely pharmacologically inactive dilutants (used to add bulk) or caffeine (believed to increase the bioavailability of heroin when smoked).”
We were speciously told for decades that it was the criminal sourcing of these drugs that led to so many deaths, even as equal numbers of opiate users were dying from pharmacologically pure Oxycodone and the like. But ‘drug checking’ is spinning the same narrative.
Drug Free Australia does not deny that criminal-manufactured pills with high potency opioids masquerading as lower potency opioids will cause some unexpected fatalities, but much more evidence is needed to show that these are anything but the tiny minority of fatalities.
Balanced against this are the massive number of opiate deaths caused by the harm reductionist messaging which teaches the ‘safe use of illicit drugs’, of which drug checking is seminally a part. This messaging quadrupled opiate deaths between 1984 (below 250 for 15-44 year olds) and 1,116 for 15-54 year olds in 1999. The prevention and rehabilitation priorities of Tough on Drugs made opiate deaths plummet by 67% (or a massive 750 opiate deaths per year), where they stayed for 7 years until a new Federal Government scrapped them. In the decade following, with the ‘safe use of drugs’ message again prioritised, opiate deaths skyrocketed 260% with other contributing polydrug-use illicit drug deaths increasing 210-590%. Harm Reduction’s ‘safe use of drugs’ ideology has very demonstrably added many, many thousands of opiate deaths to Australian mortality tolls and heavily weights any set of balances against a few lives saved by ‘drug checking’. Drug Free Australia has no problem with law enforcement continuing to publicise contaminants or adulterants in seized drugs, maintaining the message that drug use is not acceptable, rather than allowing drug-normalisating NGOs to take that role.
In case you missed our documents supporting the above paragraph last time we sent them, here they are once again for your information and edification.
Gary Christian
PRESIDENT
Drug Free Australia
0422 163 141
NSW Drug Summit 4 DFA handouts
