The New South Wales government will be asked to formally recognise the powerful synthetic opioids called nitazenes as a “growing threat” as it faces calls to introduce drug-checking services.
The Legalise Cannabis party MP, Jeremy Buckingham, will move a motion in state parliament on Wednesday night to acknowledge that nitazenes are an emerging problem, including for people who don’t typically take opioids.
“Let’s be honest, nitazenes aren’t just another drug – they’re a ticking timebomb,” Buckingham will tell parliament, according to a copy of his speech seen by Guardian Australia.
“It’s not just heroin users at risk here. Young people taking recreational drugs are going down because there’s no way to know what’s in the drugs they’re taking. Without proper drug-checking services, it’s a deadly gamble.”
Buckingham said he expected the Labor government to support his motion after watering it down to say it will “consider” drug-checking services as part of its drug summit later this year, rather than committing to establishing them.
The health minister, Ryan Park, said the government was “concerned about the risk nitazenes presents to our community” and supported a “comprehensive range of existing measures geared towards awareness, prevention and harm minimisation”.
The premier, Chris Minns, has said his government will not make a decision on a drug-checking policy until after the drug summit, where Park said “experts across a range of fields that interact with addiction and its broader health and social consequences” would be heard.
Earlier this year, NSW Health warned the public that nitazenes could be up to 500 times more potent than heroin and said four people had been hospitalised after ingesting them and suffering “severe” opioid overdoses.
Nitazenes, which are often mixed into other drugs without the user’s knowledge, have been linked to more than 200 deaths in North America and Europe between 2019 and 2023.
In April 2022, they claimed the life of 18-year-old carpentry apprentice Jetson Gordon, who died at home in Melbourne after taking counterfeit medication he had ordered online and believed was oxycodone.
Jetson’s father, John Gordon, said his son had bought the drugs from the UK in an attempt to treat the anxiety he had been struggling with since moving to Melbourne from his home town in northern NSW.
Half a tablet was enough to kill him.
“He was a loving, caring, beautiful kid that made a mistake,” Gordon said.
“I don’t want other people to go through what we’ve been through, and it’s a waste of productive people that are good people in our community that are dying.”
Gordon urged the NSW premier to introduce drug-checking services to allow people to test substances to make sure they were what they thought they were and make an educated choice about taking them.
He said he feared many Australians were buying medication online after having “fallen through the gaps in the health system” even if they didn’t take drugs recreationally, and that they needed to be aware of the risks.
Gordon urged people to put naloxone, a life-saving overdose-reversal medication which is free at many pharmacies and can be administered as a nasal spray, in their first aid kits.
“The key things are: raising awareness; pill testing; naloxone,” he said.
The chief executive officer of drug advocacy group Unharm, Dr Will Tregoning, said the community was “completely unprepared” and Minns needed to act.
The NSW Users and Aids Association chief executive officer, Dr Mary Ellen Harrod, said her organisation had long advocated for police to carry naloxone.
She said the public needed to be made more aware of overdose risks and how to reverse an opioid overdose with naloxone.
“We just had the funeral go past our office today of the man who died in Glebe at the end of August,” she said.
“It’s just a really sharp reminder. He was just at a party and didn’t recognise the signs of an overdose and passed away and it didn’t need to happen.”
The 31-year-old man was one of two people whom NSW authorities said died from heroin overdoses after taking what they thought was cocaine at a house party in Sydney’s inner west.
In June, Victoria police said a synthetic opioid had been present in the bodies of four people, including a 17-year-old boy, who were found dead at a house in Melbourne.
Minns’ office was contacted for comment.
