Canberra PCYC CEO Cheryl O’Donnell says young drug users need help now. Photo: PCYC.
An alarming increase in powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl being used by ACT teenagers is being reported by a key youth welfare organisation.
Canberra Police Citizens Youth Club team members are hearing disturbing reports from their teenage clients of fentanyl use rising, even unwittingly because it is often mixed with other drugs such as cannabis, methamphetamines and cocaine.
The reports come after police warned of the potentially lethal illicit drugs hitting Canberra streets after attending multiple suspected drug overdoses.
Since August, four people have died as a result of suspected drug overdoses, including a man and a woman on the same day.
Police suspect high drug purity levels or the addition of synthetic opioids, such as fentanyl or nitazene, may be responsible.
Canberra PCYC CEO Cheryl O’Donnell said the arrival of fentanyl in Canberra in combination with other drugs was a nightmare scenario, particularly when services are stretched and there was a lack of programs for young people under 18.
Ms O’Donnell said PCYC had tried to refer young people to a service with accommodation but they had to be over 18 for most services to take them.
“These kids won’t be alive by the time they’re 18,” she said.
Ms O’Donnell has alerted at least four ACT Government ministers and has lined up meetings in January.
She’ll be urging a boost in funding to bolster services so they can take younger clients, but ideally, the ACT should have its own live-in rehabilitation centre for under-18s.
It would need to be on the edge of town with sufficient distance from where young people could relapse, and would not necessarily cost a fortune.
A block of land with some cabins would be enough, Ms O’Donnell said.
A model could be Mission Australia’s Triple Care Farm for drug and alcohol rehabilitation in the Southern Highlands.
She has observed over her nine years with Canberra PCYC that the age of drug users in the ACT was getting lower, and service providers needed to rethink their entry levels for programs.
“I just don’t know where it’s going to end up,” Ms O’Donnell said.
Australian Federal Police seized 11kg of fentanyl in 2022 when it was illegally transported through the Port of Melbourne. That shipment, which originated in Canada, was enough to produce over five million doses of the deadly drug. Photo: AFP.
The young people PCYC dealt with weren’t the types to have their drugs tested at the Cantest facility.
They often came from disrupted or abusive families where alcohol or drug use was already a problem, were disengaged from education and were homeless or couch-surfing.
“These kids will take different things, with alcohol as well, and it’s because whatever’s happening in their lives, the trauma and that sort of thing, their mental health is not in a good place,” Ms O’Donnell said.
“They’re always looking for something that’s going to make them feel better, and if someone says, this will make you feel good, they’re not going to knock it back.”
Dealers were also mixing drugs with fentanyl deliberately to get buyers hooked.
To finance their drug habit, kids took to petty crime or providing sexual favours.
Ms O’Donnell was unsure if the ACT decriminalisation of a certain level of drug possession was making matters worse, but she is worried by the experiences in the US and Canada and the explosion in fentanyl use there.
Not that she wants to see young people with a drug problem criminalised.
“If we had a service provision that was set up specifically to get these kids back on track with the right drug rehabilitation support and that sort of thing, you’d be a lot better off doing it that way than to lock up, release and they go and do exactly the same thing again because they’ve not been given that support to break the habit,” she said.
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