Meth, meanwhile, represents an ever-present threat in Australia’s drug scene.
Heroin and meth use has remained stable over the last year, but one of the drugs has decreased in price and the other has increased in perceived availability.
The data comes from the National Drug & Alcohol Research Centre’s annual Illicit Drug Reporting System survey and the Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System survey, released today.
Illicit Drug Reporting System findings
The first report draws on interviews with a sentinel sample 900 Australians who inject drugs, conducted earlier this year. It has been running since 2000.
In keeping with the fact that methamphetamine was the most popular “drug of choice” among the illicit drug survey participants, crystal meth was also perceived as easy or very easy to obtain by 91% of users, an increase on 86% last year.
The price for a point has remained at $50.
Meth officially took over heroin as the most-often nominated drug of choice in 2021, although the preference level for the two has been very close since 2017.
The perceived accessibility of heroin held steady over the last year, but the price for one point has dropped to $70, from $80 last year. NDARC considers the price change to be within the limits of “stable”.
The percentage of people reporting the current heroin quality as “high”, though, is at 30%; the highest since monitoring began.
Injection remained the most popular method of administration of both drug types.
One-third of respondents said they re-used their own needles, and 4% said they had injected with a needle already used by another person.
Knowledge of the take-home over the counter naloxone program was relatively high, at 66%, but only 40% of respondents said they had been trained in administering the opioid-reversal drug.
Among the 85% of people who said they had ever heard of naloxone, one in four had used it to resuscitate someone at least once.
In terms of pharmaceutical drugs, non-prescribed benzodiazepine use has hit the lowest point since monitoring began, with just one in four reporting having used the drug in the last six months.
Recent use of non-prescribed pharmaceutical stimulants and antipsychotics also fell to the lowest point since recording began.
Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System findings
NDARC’s annual Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System survey draws from a different cohort of about 700 drug users, who skew younger and wealthier.
The top-line finding was that, out of all drug types, the ecstasy supply has felt the biggest negative impact from the pandemic.
Only 88% of participants had used ecstasy in the six months prior to data collection, compared to 95% in 2021.
NDARC deputy program lead for drug trends Dr Rachel Sutherland told a symposium today that the decline in frequency of ecstasy use is a reflection of disruption to the market.
“It’s also a reflection of the fact that there’s been fewer opportunities for people to go out and attend festivals, events, or other kinds of venues where people might typically use ecstasy,” she said.
More people indicated that ecstasy was difficult or very difficult to access this year compared to last year, while perceived availability of methamphetamines remained high.
A similar amount of people in the ecstasy cohort and the illicit drugs cohort rated crystal meth as easy or very easy to find.
The other big finding was that 65% of respondents had used non-prescribed e-cigarettes over the previous six months, an increase over the 57% who had reported using e-cigarettes in 2021.
This increase is despite laws coming in last year which were theoretically meant to make the devices more difficult to access.
“We were interested to see if this regulation has had an impact upon e-cigarette use amongst our groups of people who use drugs,” Dr Sutherland said.
“And essentially, the short answer is that no, it doesn’t appear to have.”
People were also using e-cigarettes about two times as often as they had been last year, for a median of three days a week.
In more positive news, participants in both studies proved to be fairly responsive to drug contamination alerts.
Among the ecstasy cohort, about a third reported changing their behaviour after receiving an alert that there was a batch of tainted ecstasy on the market.
“The most common ways they had changed their behaviour was by avoiding using drugs which matched those in the alert and by obtaining drugs from a trusted source,” Dr Sutherland said.
About a third of people in the injecting drugs cohort reported changing their behaviour after receiving an alert that there was heroin containing other drugs on the market.
Instead of avoiding the drug though, most people managed the risk by using less during that period.
