In the middle of winter last year, in a unit in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, Carly Morse, Thomas Vale, Michael Hodgkinson and Abdul El Sayed used a rolled-up bank note to inhale cocaine. About 3am on 24 June 2024, all four likely became unresponsive.
El Sayed’s uncle, Cory Lewis, became concerned late the following night when his nephew, who had been living with him, did not return home.
He banged on the door of the unit but there was no answer. A reflective tint on a side window meant he could not see inside, so Lewis jumped a fence and went to the back of the unit.
Through a small gap in a blind on the rear kitchen window, Lewis could see El Sayed sitting on the floor against the pantry with froth coming from his mouth.
Lewis used a rubber mallet to smash his way inside the unit.
Hodgkinson was face-down at the entrance of the lounge. Vale lay also face-down nearby. Morse was between the couch and rear sliding door.
Each had likely died within minutes of each other, a coroner later found.
Morse, 42, and Vale, 32, were in a relationship, and both were parents. Hodgkinson was 37.
El Sayed, the father of an infant daughter, was only 17.
The substance they snorted was not cocaine, as they had thought, but protonitazene, a highly toxic synthetic opioid.
“We don’t want his death to be in vain,” El Sayed’s aunt, Fatima El Tarek, told his inquest.
“If we can prevent one more loss of life by sharing our pain and devastation it will be worth it, and it will become part of his legacy.
“Consuming any illicit drug or substance could be fatal. You don’t know what you’re taking.”
A game of ‘Russian roulette’
The four Broadmeadows deaths were the largest cluster of Australian overdoses linked to nitazenes, extremely potent drugs that in some forms are 500 times stronger than heroin and 10 times stronger than fentanyl.
Nitazenes have never been approved for clinical medicine, despite having been developed by the pharmaceutical industry in the 1950s as analgesics. And yet they are increasingly common on the black market: in vapes sold as containing cannabis, in pills shaped as teddy bears supposed to be MDMA, in powder trafficked as cocaine, in counterfeit pain medication.
It was not until 2019 that a nitazene was first reported to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime; now 26 different nitazene substances are on their radar. In September, a pill-testing site in Canberra recorded the first known detection of isotocyanozene in Australia, a drug never before reported to the UNODC.
Nitazenes have been linked to thousands of overdose deaths in the US and dozens in the UK, with the Australian federal police saying that taking them is like playing “Russian roulette”. The Australian Border Force has made more than 60 interceptions of the drugs, mostly in the post; the acting commander, Troy Sokoloff, last December warned “the threat they pose to the Australian community is immense”.
The scale of the danger is in direct contrast to how little can prove fatal: less than a drop, or only a fifth of a grain of salt, can be enough to kill.
There have been at least 30 nitazene-related overdoses in Australia since the drugs were first detected in the country in 2021, studies show, but that is likely a significant underestimation and a number of suspicious deaths are under police or coronial investigation.
The death toll linked to the drugs in Australia has prompted familiar calls to arms: conservative politicians and police warn there is no such thing as safe illicit drugs, and harm-reduction advocates plead for more to be done to limit the carnage.
Photograph: Australian federal police
In 2024 a Victorian coroner reported that there had been 16 overdoses involving nitazenes in the previous three years and called for a state government-funded drug-checking service that could prevent similar deaths.
The coroner was delivering findings into the death of SL, a 38-year-old man who was found unresponsive by his father in late 2022, in one of the first nitazene deaths examined by the coroner in Australia. The man died after injecting what he thought was heroin.
It was not the first time the court recommended such a service; indeed, it recommended it on four separate occasions in relation to eight drug overdose deaths in the previous three years.
“It is impossible to know for certain whether SL would have submitted a sample of the substance he injected on or prior to 5 December 2022 to a Victorian drug-checking service, had one existed at the time,” coroner Ingrid Giles found in March 2024.
“However, he would have at least had the option to do so.”
Four days after the deaths in Broadmeadows, the acting secretary of the Victorian health department, Katherine Whetton, wrote to Giles and told her the state government would be trialling such a service.
A speck can be fatal
An inquest into the Broadmeadows deaths in April heard evidence from Associate Prof Dimitri Gerostamoulos, the chief toxicologist at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine.
About a decade ago, Gerostamoulos travelled to Vienna as part of a UNODC working group of international toxicologists designing a portal to track novel synthetic drugs.
“At the time, it was recognised that these were causing great harm around the world,” he said.
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Soon after, the portal started to record reports of nitazenes.
Most drug users were accidentally consuming nitazenes in “tainted” illicit substances, as opposed to seeking them out.
If tainted with nitazenes, as little as six puffs of a vape, one pill sold as MDMA or a single line of “cocaine” can be enough to kill.
The manufacturers of these substances may be intentionally adding nitazenes to change or increase the “high” an illicit drug produced, Gerostamoulos said, but they were so potent that adding a speck could be fatal.
Even first responders who attend crime scenes where people have overdosed on nitazenes must be careful they do not inadvertently inhale them.
Their potency, Gerostamoulos said, causes respiratory depression within minutes, leading to hypoxia, the body being deprived of oxygen.
“They can lead to paralysis, seizures and most often, death,” he said.
Gerostamoulos identified various measures including the use of naloxone, a drug that can reverse the effects of opioids, drug-testing services, improved education and nitazene testing strips as possible ways to reduce nitazene-related deaths.
But many of the measures identified by Gerostamoulos are not available in major Australian cities. Others are even being stripped back in states that recently recorded nitazene deaths.
On 15 October, Queensland Health issued an alert about nitazenes, after two overdose deaths in the previous fortnight related to the drugs.
Later that day, the deputy premier, Jarrod Bleijie, defended the state government’s decision to abandon drug-testing without taking the policy to parliament.
“Only the commies in Victoria support pill-testing,” he said.
“They are illegal for a reason – they kill you.
“The only people that benefit from illegal drugs and pill-testing is bikie criminal gangs.”
Queensland is, however, at the forefront of another type of testing: the analysis of wastewater for nitazenes.
Whereas other illicit drugs are regularly detected during this type of analysis, no test existed for nitazenes, until research led by the University of Queensland detected the drug in Australian wastewater for the first time in 2023. Researcher Dr Richard Bade says he is working to ensure he can test for more types of nitazene and could, in theory, be able to analyse wastewater within a week.
It is challenging work: because of how little of the drug is needed to produce a high or kill, it is like finding the point of a particularly sharp needle in a particularly dense haystack.
The Broadmeadows four
Despite the growing number of nitazene-related deaths, few people have been charged with trafficking the drugs that caused them.
In September, police in Victoria decided there was not enough evidence to charge anyone with supplying the nitazene-laced cocaine that killed the four people in Broadmeadows.
“Any new information provided to police will be thoroughly investigated,” a spokesperson said.
There was little for police to go on. But one lead was a series of messages exchanged between Hodgkinson and the dealer on Signal, an encrypted messaging app, the day before the deaths.
The username of the person Hodgkinson was communicating with, the person who sold him the nitazine laced cocaine that would take his life and that of three others, was TryMe.
