More than 2,000 drug-induced deaths in Australia in 2023

More than two thousand people died of from drug overdoses in 2023 the majority were unintentional and mostly involved opioids.

Transcript

00:00Honestly, I think these numbers are really shocking, and it is a wake-up call. I think

00:06many of these deaths are happening in people's private homes in suburbia and in regional

00:13and rural towns, and so we're not really seeing it. When you add up the numbers of all of

00:17those people impacted by overdose, it is really shocking. I mean, it's the equivalent of a

00:22Boeing 737 every month in Australia, and nearly 80% of the overdose deaths are actually

00:30unintentional, and so it's very much a silent tragedy that's going on in Australia, and I

00:37think it's particularly troubling because it's happening to people in the prime of their life.

00:42Most of the deaths are occurring for people in their 30s, 40s and 50s, and so they've often

00:48got children that they leave behind, or indeed their parents are still alive, and so the

00:53level of grief that sort of follows these deaths impacts so many people across all parts of

01:02the community.

01:03You know, we've got a lot of faith in prescription medications, and that's really important, but

01:09we've got to actually understand that they, in excess, can be dangerous, and most of the

01:14deaths are combinations of drugs. So it could be prescription drugs in combination with other

01:21prescription drugs or with legal drugs like alcohol or indeed illegal drugs. The typical

01:26pattern is a combination of substances, and I think we need to be much more savvy about that

01:34in the community, and I think the healthcare system really needs to step up and protect us

01:39from some of these harms. But we've also got illicit drug use issues in our community that

01:44are going unaddressed. We know what we can do with opioid overdoses very effectively, and

01:50they are still the major driver of overdose deaths in Australia, and that is whether they're

01:55pharmaceutical or illicit. There's a miracle drug called Narcan or Naloxone, but you've got

02:00to have it with you to administer, and you've got to know the signs of an overdose. And so we've

02:06got some really simple solutions that we're not actually using, one of which is to educate

02:10the community. We don't have any government education to scale across Australia around

02:16how to identify an overdose and how to respond to an overdose, and that means that people are

02:21dying unnecessarily.