Ice focus obscures the deadly threat of heroin

Its hideous power is well known in Canberra as in communities everywhere; the violent rages of ice users in hospital emergency wards, the paranoia, destruction of personal health and relationships and the dark economy of sexual exploitation of those addicted.

Ice, according to some reports, will soon have a new competitor in the form of flakka, a drug that combines all the worst aspects of numerous traditional drugs.

Like ice it is a stimulant, sending people into an adrenaline-fuelled state and, like LSD, it has an hallucinogenic affect, which sends them into a rampage.

Before ice it was "meow meow", a cross between MDMA and cocaine.

But the focus on the latest and most terrifying drugs to hit can tend to obscure the tragedy of another - and familiar - drug killing young Canberrans - heroin.

As reported in the Sunday Canberra Times accidental deaths caused by opioids, which include heroin and prescription medications such as morphine, have reached a five-year high in the ACT.

This is a reminder of a time, not so long ago, when the drug debate in the ACT centred on heroin.

In the 1990s the merits of a legalised and safe injecting room for heroin addicts were heavily discussed, but the controversial idea was eventually quashed.

Fast forward to today, and while ice addicts rampage through hospitals, heroin kills far more people but fewer people talk about it any more.

More than half of the 32 deaths recorded in the ACT, according to data from the most recently available two-year period, involved the use of heroin.

Nationally the death toll has been massive, compared to other drugs. Accidental drug deaths involving methamphetamine were at 88 in 2010, compared to 849 deaths in the same year involving opioids, the most commonly identified of which was heroin.

Because of this the program in the ACT to give heroin and other opioid users the overdose-reversal drug Naloxone should continue for years to come.

It has saved more than 50 lives since 2011. That is a second chance for many.

In the words of Peter Taylor, who lost his son to a heroin overdose about the same time the Naloxone trial was being introduced: "The crazy thing about bloody heroin is, if you get the antidote for it quickly, it's fine."

But, while effective, the antidote is not the solution. Someone relying on Naloxone is already a long way down a dangerous path.

Parents Marion and Brian McConnell said health and social support were needed and, like many parents of those who have died, believe prohibition creates more problems than solutions.

They have been lobbying for drug reform and against what they say are the negative affects of prohibition for years.

It is unlikely injecting rooms will be back on the agenda any time soon but it appears as though the stories about drugs such as ice and flakka will be in the headlines and on television news broadcasts for some time to come.

If the community is going to debate the drugs problem it should do so while remembering ice is not the only scourge destroying the lives of loved ones. Other drugs have been doing it for much longer.