Middle-aged men are more likely to die of a drug overdose in Australia than any other group, a report has found.

In 2014, people aged 30-59 accounted for 78% of all overdose deaths.

Australia’s Annual Overdose Report 2016 – released by the Penington Institute – challenged the stereotype that young people were most at risk of dying of an overdose, the institute’s chief executive, John Ryan, said.

Australians aged 40-49 were the most likely to die of a drug overdose. Deaths in this age group almost doubled, from 174 in 2004 to 342 in 2014.

According to the report, based on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, men overdose in much higher numbers than women, with 762 men and 375 women dying from an accidental drug overdose in 2014.

Despite common perceptions that illicit drugs are to blame, prescription medications were responsible for 71% of all overdoses. Between 2008 and 2014, there was an 87% increase in prescription opioid deaths, with the greatest increase occurring in rural/regional Australia.

Ryan said the statistics on accidental overdose in Australia were “grim”.

“Accidental deaths from overdose reached 1,137 in 2014, a rapid rise from 705 deaths in 2004 and a 61% increase in a decade,” he said.

“The report also indicates that more people die of an overdose of prescription medications such as oxycodone and benzodiazepines like Valium than from illicit drugs.”

It was time for significant investments to be made to reduce the toll from accidental overdose, he added.



The president of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, Dr Alex Wodak, said it was a “big, growing and neglected issue” in Australia.

“In my view trying to reduce the supply of drugs, however attractive to the community and therefore politically attractive, rarely meets the expectations about what it can achieve and often is often accompanied by serious, unintended negative consequences,” he said. “This, for me, is fundamentally a demand problem.”

There was a large unmet demand for opioid addiction treatment, Wodak said, which was costly, often had waiting lists and did not run for long enough to treat people effectively.

As well as expanding treatment programs, there needed to be supervised drug consumption rooms, with only one currently operating in Australia, in Sydney’s Kings Cross.

“That would drive down the overdose death rate and allow social workers to target those in need and attract people into treatment,” Wodak said.

The report also found that Western Australia had the highest number of overdose deaths per capita, the report found, with 5.8 per 100,000 in 2014, followed by New South Wales with 5.1 per 100,000. Since 2004, WA’s per capita overdose deaths have risen from the lowest to the highest in the country, a 222% increase.

The national increase over the same period was 37%.