People trying to buy illicit synthetic opioids and sedatives online to treat pain, anxiety and insomnia increasingly risk taking a different drug that has caused dozens of deaths among heroin users, a leading expert has warned.
Nitazenes – synthetic and extremely powerful drugs implicated in fatalities of chronic powdered heroin users in Birmingham, Bristol and London in recent months – have been detected in illicit supplies of tablets being sold as diazepam and codeine that appeal to a wider market.
New figures released to the Guardian by the National Crime Agency reveal 65 people have died from taking nitazenes in the past six months – more than two a week, while detections in drug supplies have increased more than fivefold in the last two years.
Diazepam, first marketed as Valium and once nicknamed “mother’s little helper” after the Rolling Stones sang about it in 1966, is a legal sedative when prescribed but is also available illegally for a couple of pounds a tablet. Nitazenes are also being found sold as Xanax, brand name of the drug alprazolam.
“[Nitazenes] are being mixed into heroin but it is also in fake diazepam, fake codeine and the person buying the tablets online is a very different kind of user to a heroin user,” Dr Caroline Copeland, the director of the National Programme on Substance Abuse Deaths said. “It means the risk is much wider.”
Last November, the Metropolitan police seized approximately 150,000 tablets containing nitazenes in a sophisticated factory set up at an address in Waltham Forest in north-east London. Detectives said the drugs were likely sold via the darknet, using encrypted chat applications and social media. Eleven people have been charged with criminal offences.
The raids were part of “a national UK law enforcement effort to investigate the increase in synthetic opioid products being adulterated into the drugs supply network”, Scotland Yard said.
Last year, the Guardian reported on a cluster of nitazene deaths in Birmingham involving mis-sold powders. After Clive Cooper, 38, a long-term heroin user with schizophrenia was found on his bedroom floor a neighbour said he had taken heroin. In fact, he had injected nitazene. A wrap of an unused brown crystallised substance was later identified as nitazene, which the case pathologist said was about 20 times stronger than fentanyl, which itself can be many times stronger than heroin.
Maria Green, 42, who lived with bipolar disorder, anorexia and depression, died on the same night from the same drug. She was discovered by a friend collapsed on her bed.
“This is likely the tip of the iceberg, as many tests are still in process and emerging drugs are not routinely tested for,” said members of the Faculty of Public Health drugs special interest group in the journal Lancet Public Health over the weekend. “Without concerted action, nitazenes could devastate communities of people who use a range of drugs, including those who use drugs infrequently or source benzodiazepines and opioid painkillers from the internet.”
Benzodiazepines include Xanax, one of a group of tranquillisers estimated to be taken illicitly by about 150,000 people in England and Wales aged 16 to 59, according to official figures.
Most of the known deaths from nitazenes have been from powders but Will Melbourne, an autistic teenager from Cheshire, died from an accidental overdose in December 2020 after he took a blue pill he believed was oxycodone but contained nitazene. His mother told the BBC: “This wasn’t someone who’s just trying to get high to have a good time. It was an obsession with trying to make himself feel better.”
Last month, doctors in Teesside warned patients of increased risk of overdose and death with an alert that nitazenes have been linked with deaths in the area and “have been found in tablets and heroin”. Public Health Scotland has also warned of nitazenes being detected in counterfeit tablets mis-sold as oxycodone.
Nitazenes are up to 100 times more powerful than heroin. Amid a shortage of genuine heroin caused in part by the Taliban’s crackdown on poppy farming in Afghanistan, drug dealers have been mixing nitazenes into powders sold as heroin to be injected or smoked.
Another powerful synthetic drug, xylazine, has also been detected in tablets sold on the hidden market as codeine, tramadol, Valium and Xanax, according to drug testing facilities such as Wedinos.
