UP TO 92,000 NEED DAILY HEROIN FIX

The number of heroin addicts in Australia has more than doubled in the past
10 years, with between 67,000 and 92,000 adults now believed to use the
drug daily.

And two new academic reports say the prescription of legal opiates such as
methadone is also rising significantly - up 17 per cent a year nationwide -
with consumption of methadone syrup in NSW more than double that of other
states.

The heroin dependence study, prepared by the University of NSW's National
Drug and Alcohol Centre, says that in 1997-98 there were 74,000 (median
estimate) heroin users in Australia or seven per 1,000 people aged 15 to
54. This compared with an estimated 34,000 dependent users in the period
1984-87.

The data, published in the Medical Journal of Australia today, was compiled
by examining fatal heroin overdose deaths, first-time entrants to methadone
treatment and heroin-related arrests in NSW.

The results revealed that NSW and Victoria accounted for 75 per cent of all
heroin-dependent people in the country, with 35,400 users estimated to live
in NSW.

The study concluded that while the figures needed to be interpreted with
caution, Australia had a "substantial public health problem with dependent
heroin use" which nevertheless appeared to be similar in magnitude to other
similar parts of the world.

"The Australian prevalence is the same as the estimated prevalence of
heroin dependence in the United Kingdom (7 per 1,000 adults aged 15-54
years)," the report noted.

One of the authors of the study, Professor Wayne Hall, said there was good
news and bad in the results: "The bad news is that the problem has
continued to get worse under governments of all political persuasions, but
the good news is that we are no worse off than other comparable countries."
he said.

Another study, of legal opioid use collated by the School of Pharmacology
at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, showed there was a need to
better evaluate the prescription of legal opioids such as methadone,
pethidine and morphine in Australia.

The report, also published today in the journal, compared rates of
methadone consumption in Australia with trends overseas.

It revealed that Australia ranked equal highest in the world, with
Switzerland, New Zealand and Denmark, for methadone use.

(Methadone maintenance treatment is one of the most common forms of opioid
replacement therapy, which involves administering a long-acting opioid drug
to narcotic dependent patients in an effort to prevent or reduce the
injection of illegal opioids.)

The study said that between 1984 and 1998 the consumption rate of methadone
rose by 17 per cent a year, compared with an international average increase
of about 12 per cent a year.

The findings are consistent with Australia's national strategy of promoting
access to methadone treatment and the harm minimisation approach to drug
treatment.

The study's authors say it is vital to identify trends in licit opioid use
in the States and Territories to assess the possibility of
over-prescription or the diversion of prescribed drugs to illegal uses such
as injection of methadone.

"An unquantified factor was the disproportionately high diversion in NSW of
more than sixfold the rates of methadone syrup diverted into injection of
the drug by intravenous drug users compared with other jurisdictions." the
study said.