A woman has died and two others have been hospitalised after suspected drug overdoses on the Gold Coast.
Queensland paramedics were called to a hotel in Surfers Paradise at 10.58pm on Friday night. Emergency responders found seven patients, three of whom were in critical condition, including a 43-year-old woman who was experiencing cardiac arrest at the scene.
Efforts to revive the woman at the scene were unsuccessful and she was declared dead.
Two other women, also aged 43, were struggling to breathe and rushed to the Gold Coast University hospital in a critical condition.
One woman has since been declared stable, but the second remained in intensive care on Saturday.
The Queensland ambulance service (QAS) said another four people at the scene refused transport and treatment after helping paramedics to provide medical care for the other women.
On Saturday, the QAS’s senior operations supervisor, Mitchell Ware, said there was “no such thing as a safe drug”.
“Any time you take something that isn’t prescribed for you, there is obviously an element of risk to that,” Ware said.
“When people are obviously buying these drugs, there is an element of risk. Now you don’t know what’s going into them. You don’t know who’s made them. You may be told one thing, it may be something completely different.”
Ware said similar incidents “occupy a lot of [our] ambulances’ time and a lot of Queensland Ambulance services as well” with paramedics responding to similar incidents “every day”.
Police will prepare a report for the coroner on the 40-year-old woman’s death.
- with AAP
