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  • 2 years ago
The number of drug overdose deaths in Australia has almost doubled in two decades. The Pennington Institute report has found there were more than 2300 drug induced fatalities in 2022, 80 percent of which were unintentional. Almost three quarters of the deaths involved two or more types of drugs, and opioids were the most commonly associated with unintentional deaths. Advocates are calling for a national prevention strategy to curb the spike in drug-related deaths.

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00:00The overdose toll is continuing to increase and so it's actually been more than the road
00:08toll for nearly 10 years now.
00:11That's the sort of scale of the problem, but it's not talked about very much and it's possibly
00:15not talked about, I think, because of the stigma and shame that we've got around drug
00:19use issues generally.
00:21If you look at it from a population perspective, it's the second or third leading cause of
00:26death for men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s.
00:30There's been a massive increase amongst people in their 50s, but it's really touching people
00:34from all walks of life and it's about the same now between regional and rural Australia
00:41and the cities.
00:43Most overdoses happen at home, so it's not something that's in the public square nearly
00:48enough, but we're losing people at an extraordinary rate.
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