Thursday, 19 October 2023

Fentanyl

Tim READ (Brunswick) (17:27): (397) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Mental Health, and the action I seek is for her to urgently release the state government’s plan to respond to the likely imminent arrival of fentanyl in Victoria’s illegal drug market. I appreciate that there might still be some planning that needs to be done, but this is quite urgent.

Fentanyl is an opioid drug from the same family as morphine and heroin, but it is at least 50 times stronger than heroin and, importantly, it is faster acting. If someone has an overdose of fentanyl – and given its much greater strength, that is highly likely in an unregulated black market – they will stop breathing much faster than if they have an overdose of heroin. Therefore if help is to arrive, it needs to arrive very quickly, within a couple of minutes – probably before an ambulance can get there.

Fentanyl is now common in the illegal drug market in the United States. It is estimated to have killed 67,000 people in the United States in 2021, which on a population basis is about the same as 1200 Victorians. It is not yet common in Australia, but the word is that it is arriving, and it has been detected in several seizures of drugs. One in particular was a seizure at the Port of Melbourne in December 2021, which contained 11 kilograms of fentanyl. That is equivalent to 5.5 million potentially lethal doses.

A key part of the response to the likely arrival of fentanyl will be the drug naloxone, also known as Narcan, which reverses the action of fentanyl if it is given soon enough. The recent federal government Take Home Naloxone program seeks to make the drug available widely and freely, but that conflicts with some – in its time progressive – legislation from this government in 2020 which still restricts it to pharmacist only, a bit like the morning-after pill, and limits its availability to certain classes of people. We need drug users, police, outreach workers – everybody – to be able to carry this drug and to obtain it whenever they want it. Police have trialled it in WA, and as I understand it, it has been a successful trial. It probably should even be in vending machines, like it is in Canada. We could even put it in a supervised injecting room in the CBD, but whatever we do, we need a plan and we need it soon.