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Needs must. The state of Victoria in south-east Australia has announced it will spend A$30 million on setting up real-time monitoring of all addictive prescription drugs to tackle soaring rates of addiction and death.

Last year, more people in Victoria died from overdoses of prescription drugs than from illicit drugs or road accidents. The picture is similar across the rest of the country, with coroners’ reports revealing a seven-fold rise in deaths related to prescription painkiller oxycodone (OxyContin) between 2001 and 2011.

The government of Victoria intends to set up a monitoring system that creates a real-time record each time a person gets a prescription filled for any medication classed as a “drug of dependence” – including oxycodone, morphine and alprazolam (Xanax).


The hope is that this will identify people who are “doctor shopping” – visiting multiple physicians to obtain additional prescriptions for addictive drugs.

With the database in place, family doctors, pharmacists and hospitals should be able to run on-the-spot checks, as well offering treatment and counselling to addicts. “We’ve been calling for this for years,” says Tony Bartone, president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association.

“We hope it will give us the opportunity to intervene at an early stage before the addiction becomes more deep-seated,” he says.

Move to heroin

Alex Wodak, president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, says he supports the system but it shouldn’t be seen as a cure-all. “The experience in general with attempts to reduce drug supply has been that the benefits are much less than expected, and the unintended negative consequences are much greater than expected,” he says.

A similar monitoring system was implemented in the state of Tasmania in 2012, although it does not track several key drugs, including Valium (diazepam). Early unpublished findings suggest that Tasmania’s system may have simply pushed many prescription opioid addicts to switch to illegal drugs like heroin instead.

“It appears that pharmaceutical overdose deaths have decreased but heroin deaths have increased, meaning that total opioid overdose deaths have stayed about the same,” says Wodak. The lack of affordable access to opioid addiction treatment programmes is a problem, he says.

According to a federal Health Department spokesperson, the states of New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory are also considering implementing real-time, monitoring systems for prescription drugs.

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