A Sydney drug dealer’s appeal to reduce his sentence for supplying fentanyl has been rejected after he mistakenly gave it to a sex worker, resulting in her hospitalization.
An Inner West drug dealer who gave a sex worker so much fentanyl she was hospitalised has failed in his bid to reduce his sentence for drug supply because he wrongly believed the drug was cocaine. Petersham’s The Gateway Club, which describes itself as Sydney ’s longest-running legal brothel offering “ultimate pleasure”, was the location of the incident. Salameh gave a sex worker a drink spiked with fentanyl at the Parramatta Road brothel, his District Court trial heard last year.
Fentanyl is the highly addictive synthetic opioid at the centre of the prescription painkiller epidemic that has devastated large rural swathes of the United States. It was also found in the autopsy of four people found dead in a home in Melbourne earlier this year, putting authorities around the country on high alert. It has so far had a minimal presence in NSW. The sex worker called the club’s manager when she became distressed and disoriented, and Salameh fled. Police searched his home several days later, seizing 175 grams of fentanyl from a sealed envelope and 3.8g from a plastic bag hidden in the wardrobe in his bedroom. Anything more than five grams of fentanyl is considered to be large commercial supply under state drug legislation. He was ultimately arrested and charged with causing a person to take an intoxicating substance to cause harm, dealing with the proceeds of crime and supplying both cocaine and fentanyl. Salameh told detectives and continued to insist throughout his trial that he believed the drug was cocaine. He said he would not have allowed fentanyl into the home in which he lived with children. He told the District Court in 2023 that he had never heard of fentanyl before his arrest and denied “doing a tester” on the sex worker by putting it in her drink. He then launched an appeal on the grounds that he believed the substance was cocaine, not fentanyl
DRUGS FENTANYL SENTENCE Sydney BROTHEL
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