A senior Canberra emergency medicine specialist has warned the risks of harm from drug use this summer has increased significantly after confirmation a deadly opiate has made it into Australia.
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The Australian Border Force has confirmed officers working at the border in Sydney have seized a small quantity of the opiate, carfentanil.
While the quantity was understood to be less than a gram, the extremely high potency of the drug means the quantity seized was enough to trigger up to 5000 potential lethal doses in humans. Carfentanil is usually used to tranquillise large animals including elephants.
Authorities nation-wide have been on high alert for the substance for months, testing the results of drug seizures at the border and those obtained through domestic police operations, in the wake of a spate of deaths linked to the drug in the United States and Canada.
Calvary Public Hospital's Dr David Caldicott said that the ACT's forensic testing laboratory had been testing "quite vigorously" for the substance, but had not yet confirmed it had made its way into Canberra's heroin supply.
But he said the Sydney confirmation meant that "the market has now become incredibly dangerous", particularly given much of the capital's supply comes from interstate through national and global criminal syndicates.
"To put it in context, our colleagues in the forensic analysis world, just for the purposes of analysis, have to gear up in personal protective equipment, just for having it ambient, present in a laboratory," he said.
"I think what this means within the heroin consuming market is it increases the potential for harm quite significantly, using heroin can be dangerous enough, but using heroin laced with carfentanil could be very lethal.
"There's also a danger for emergency responders all around the country given how potent it is, for those responding to possible overdoses to those in emergency departments, if we had one batch circulating, it could result in numerous overdoses.
"We saw it in Canada earlier this year when there were over 40 overdoses, that's enough to overwhelm any hospital's emergency department."
Dr Caldicott said while carfentanil had not been confirmed in Canberra, some signs pointed to the potential presence of lower-potency fentanyl analogues in the city.
He said two signs pointing to the potential cutting of heroin with fentanyl included a number of descriptions of recent inadvertent overdoses on website forums and a series of overdoses in both the ACT and Victoria, where the patient did not respond "in the usual way" to the commonly-used heroin reversal drug, naloxone.
A spokesman for the ABF said the service had identified some fentanyl in border importations some 50 times in the past, and such substances, as well as newer psychoactive substances could "pose significant health risks as even very small amounts can cause death".
"There is no way for users to know exactly what is in these illicit drugs, or how strong they are," he said.
Dr Caldicott said the confirmation in Sydney also proved one of two predictions among drug researchers and emergency medicine specialists for this summer.
"The first was the arrival of carfentanil and its less potent analogues in Australia, as well as the arrival of even higher potency ecstasy and it gives us no pleasure to be in a position to confirm even 50 per cent of those predictions," he said.
"We have to reiterate the message to young drug consumers both of opiates and other drugs - as carfentanil has been found in pills sold illicitly as painkillers - that it's not only associated with the heroin market.
"We need to reiterate that the drug market this season is more dangerous than it ever has been, and if people want to be safe from consuming these things, the only way to do that is not to put that drug in their mouth."
But he said there were more things that could be done to identify such new products as they were hitting the Australian market.
"It's not only testing at music festivals, but providing amnesty binds where people can dispose of drugs they believe may pose a particular hazard," he said.
"We are only identifying a fraction of those drugs coming in to Australia at the border, and if those seizures were having an effect on supply, we'd expect it to have an effect on the (cost), but there is none."
The ABF spokesman said it was "continuing to refine methods to detect illicit importations" and investigations into the seizure continued.
Fairfax Media has partnered with the Global Drug Survey for its fifth year to help understand how and why people take drugs in Australia.
