Twelve people needed medical attention after overdosing on the drug, which had been sold as cocaine
Its arrival highlights that the country lacks crucial protections against overdose, says Sarah Helm, executive director of drug research and advocacy organisation the New Zealand Drug Foundation. Those protections include access to fentanyl testing strips or Naloxone, a treatment which can reverse opioid overdose and is now widely available in the US. Naloxone is not publicly funded in New Zealand, is prescription-only, and costs about $92 for a single-use kit.
“If this indeed turned into a fentanyl adulteration of our drug supply, we don’t have the tools in place to help prevent overdose. … It’s a miracle that those dozen people have survived the overdose and that we actually had Naloxone to be able to respond to them.” Detective inspector Blair Macdonald, manager of the National Drug Intelligence Bureau, said that New Zealand police did not have their own supplies of Naloxone, and had relied on non-profit NZ Drug Foundation for a donation of the kits to use in case of further overdoses in the region.selling fentanyl testing strips, and that the country’s two non-profit providers – NZ Drug and the Needle Exchange – only had around 1000 testing strips between them.
“We’re very concerned,” he said. “This is a dangerous drug. It is responsible for killing literally hundreds of thousands of people in America … The dose rate between synthetic opioids and cocaine is stark. We’re talking a few grains of salt can be the equivalent of an appropriate dose or an overdose.”
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