Australia is seeing an “alarming and devastating” rise in the number of drug-induced deaths, with many of them preventable and being driven by opioids, including a 40% surge in heroin-related fatalities.
The findings come from preliminary annual overdose data released by the public health research organisation the Penington Institute on Wednesday.
While the report is released every August, the Penington Institute chief executive, John Ryan, said concern about the number of deaths and a lack of action to prevent them had prompted the organisation to release key findings one month early.
The report found there were 2,356 drug-induced deaths in Australia in 2022, up from 2,277 the previous year. The Penington Institute said it was the ninth year in a row that more than 2,000 drug-induced deaths have been recorded and the 2022 figure was almost double the number of road traffic deaths (1,276) in the same year.
Almost 80% of all drug-induced deaths in 2022 (1,878) were unintentional, the report found.
Opioids were the most common drug involved in unintentional deaths, with 749 deaths in 2022 compared with 681 in 2021. And of those, heroin was involved in 460 deaths, a 40% increase on the 2021 figure (328).
But deaths linked to oxycodone, morphine and codeine, which are also opioids, fell to 289, down from 332 in 2021.
“We are seeing an alarming and devastating rise in the number of drug-induced deaths recorded year on year in Australia,” Ryan said in the report’s foreword.
The report uses the latest available national fatal overdose data from cause of death information certified by doctors or coroners. This data is collected by state and territory governments, and validated and compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
Ryan told Guardian Australia the surge in heroin use was of “great concern, particularly in the context of the globalisation of drug trafficking routes”.
Health groups have sounded the alarm in recent weeks about overdoses involving dangerous and potent synthetic opioids, known as nitazenes. While the Penington report does not separate out deaths caused by synthetic opioids, in March the Victorian coroner’s court released a warning that since 2021 at least 16 fatal overdoses in the state had involved nitazenes.
Nitazenes were also involved in a cluster of 20 overdoses in NSW in April. In the same month, Victoria rejected a proposed safe injecting room, which would allow drug users to inject in a medically supervised setting, a decision that health experts warned would cost lives.
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Ryan said more deaths could be prevented with naloxone, a drug that rapidly reverses an opioid overdose and which could be a “gamechanger”, but only with adequate community education, which Australia has “very little” of.
He called for a multi-pronged harm-reduction approach, which would include community education and increased access to medication assisted therapy or opioid substitution treatment.
“We’ve got terrible barriers to access around the country to the best evidence based, cost effective treatment for opioid use disorder,” he said.
“We don’t even have a healthcare system that is willing to meaningfully and fully engage with people that are at a risk of overdose,” he said, noting that few doctors were willing to prescribe opioid substitution treatment due to a lack of remuneration.
Ryan said Australian interventions focused on law enforcement and supply reduction over evidence based harm reduction.
“It’s undeniable that our approach is failing,” he said. “But it’s hard to admit failure, and even harder to pivot to a more successful approach.
“That takes leadership and I don’t think there’s a real sense of urgency amongst politicians to show leadership in this area.”
The Penington report also revealed that the number of deaths by stimulants and alcohol increased by 4.9% and 7.6% respectively. Additionally, 22.3 Indigenous people per 100,000 died from drug use, which was 3.5 times higher than the rate of non-Indigenous deaths.
Prof Suzanne Nielsen, the deputy director of the Monash Addiction Research Centre, said deaths related to prescription opioids had been reducing due to measures to change prescribing quantities and repeat prescriptions.
“We want to see that continue,” she said. “What we don’t want to see is people that do need prescription opioids for pain trying to seek opioids from other unregulated markets, which are actually much more dangerous.”
She said illegal websites often sell falsified pharmaceutical drugs that have sometimes been found to contain nitazenes.
“We know unregulated drug markets are much more dangerous than pharmaceutical opioids,” Nielsen said.