KEY POINTS:
A drug rehabilitation expert is calling for a crackdown on prescribed drugs such as morphine and methadone being resold on the black market.
Capital and Coast District Health Board chief medical officer Dr Geoffrey Robinson believes opiates such as methadone and morphine, which are available by prescription, are making their way onto the street.
He spoke at the combined Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs and Cutting Edge Addiction Conference in Auckland yesterday.
Dr Robinson said the number of patients receiving methadone - in virtually all cases to wean them off street opiates - had increased in the past 20 years from about 400 to 4000.
"We have a wonderful opportunity in New Zealand as we are one of the few countries with no imported heroin, yet large quantities of prescription drugs are on our streets with the result that we are seeing significant numbers of addicts."
Dr Robinson, who has worked in drug clinics since 1980, said that anecdotally the trend had levelled out, although the numbers in treatment remained high.
With one morphine tablet being sold for up to $100, Dr Robinson believes some of these drugs are coming from professional "doctor shoppers" who get a prescription from a doctor and then sell them on the streets. Drugs are also making their way onto the streets via patients who divert their prescription supplies, and from forged scripts and pharmacy breakins.
Dr Robinson is concerned more could make its way onto the streets, with the rise in the prescription of these drugs. He cites figures from drug agency Pharmac which show that prescriptions for morphine, which is used for chronic pain, have quadrupled since 1992. Fifteen years ago, there were 40,000 prescriptions for morphine. Last year, there were 170,000.
He does not know how much winds up on the streets, but guessed that it was between 5 and 10 per cent.
He said efforts by the Ministry of Health, the police and the medical profession had failed to contain the abuse.
