UK sees surge in accidental nitazene deaths (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The UK is outpacing the rest of Europe in the number of deaths from nitazines, that's according to drug experts. These are synthetic opioids which can be significantly stronger than heroin. They've been found in hundreds of drug-related deaths. New data obtained by BBC News shows almost all of them were accidental, with Birmingham identified as a hotspot. Our correspondent Natavjahal has more.

[00:00:24] Speaker 2: We're almost there, almost almost, just that bit. He had a sort of little Mona Lisa smile, so little smile, but just a little one, not a big one. I just, I love the fact that he was a brave and courageous young man.

[00:00:43] Speaker 3: 21-year-old Gus had been climbing mountains in Mexico with friends in 2024 and returned to the UK, planning to go to university. He was staying at his mum's one summer evening.

[00:00:55] Speaker 2: I went to bed and in the morning he didn't get up. He had died, sitting in his chair, watching a film, he'd ordered a takeaway. It looked like he had just gone to sleep.

[00:01:13] Speaker 3: Three months later, Nicola received Gus's post-mortem report, which revealed that nitazines, super-strength synthetic opioids, were thought to be the cause of his death. He'd taken what he thought was the prescription painkiller oxycodone Nicola believes to help him sleep, bought from a drug dealer.

[00:01:30] Speaker 2: I just found it really heartbreaking that it was just so easy for him to die, you know, just to take a tablet and then go into such a deep sleep.

[00:01:44] Speaker 3: Nitazines are made in labs and, according to the National Crime Agency, have been imported to the UK from China in the post.

[00:01:52] Speaker 4: So this is etanitazine.

[00:01:53] Speaker 3: Dr Caroline Copeland has been warning people about them since they emerged from the UK a few years ago. There's enough nitazines in there and it's an absolutely tiny amount to kill 10 people.

[00:02:05] Speaker 4: Yeah, it's a few grains of sand.

[00:02:08] Speaker 3: She says that what happened to Gus is becoming more common.

[00:02:12] Speaker 4: We've now started to see not just adulteration but almost complete substitution of ingredients in pills. So people might think that they're buying an oxycodone pill or diazepam pill, but it doesn't actually contain any trace of either of those and what they're getting is nitazine instead. It's no longer just a heroin users problem, it's an anyone who uses counterfeit medicines problem. So if you're ordering drugs online from less reputable places, you can't know what you're going to get and that's a very risky behaviour now.

[00:02:45] Speaker 3: The BBC's obtained exclusive data from all available inquest records of almost 300 people whose deaths were linked to nitazines up to March 2025 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. They show nearly every death was deemed an accident and that the Birmingham and Solihull Corridor area saw more nitazine related deaths than anywhere else. And experts say the UK is now a global hotspot.

[00:03:08] Speaker 5: I think unfortunately the UK is outpacing certainly other European countries but even Canada at this time. Let's see what happens in the future but the UK is by far a leader there.

[00:03:26] Speaker 3: In a statement the Department of Health and Social Care says we are confronting the emerging threat of synthetic drugs head-on, working closely with health services and policing partners to stay ahead of criminals who target our communities. Strengthening border security is a vital part of our strategy. But some are taking the matter into their own hands. With the drug charity Cranston, Sue, a registered nurse, is going out in the West Midlands to find and help people on the street who may not use traditional support services.

[00:03:55] Speaker 6: This is a group of people with some of the highest level of need who actually we don't meet the needs of by just carrying on providing the same thing all the time. So I suppose it's just for me, I see it almost as a duty, it's like a duty of care or a moral issue really.

[00:04:14] Speaker 3: Raising awareness and even direct action are part of the solution but there is no quick fix to what is an evolving and indiscriminate danger. Navtej Johal, BBC News.

[00:04:26] Speaker 1: Navtej joins us now live. Navtej you'll know from speaking to lots of people that nitizine is still something that a lot of people haven't even heard of in the UK and we're really shocked by your report. Why is it that it's spread so quickly across the UK in the past few years?

[00:04:41] Speaker 3: Yeah it's a great question Lucy. Well originally nitizines were created as painkillers in the late 1950s but were deemed far too powerful for human consumption and then some experts believe that a few years ago when the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan and stopped the harvesting of the opium poppy bandit that led to concern among drug dealers and organised criminal networks in the UK and beyond who relied on that supply and decided to start experimenting with nitizines because they were concerned that heroin supplies might dry up. That's why we initially saw nitizines appearing in heroin samples. They are very cheap to produce, they are very difficult to detect and they are also incredibly potent but that makes them as we've seen very dangerous and has led to those hundreds of deaths across the UK.

[00:05:32] Speaker 1: Yeah so dangerous and why is it that the UK is ahead when it comes to those deaths Navtej compared to like the US and Canada?

[00:05:39] Speaker 3: Well it's difficult to say but a couple of potential reasons is that when nitizines first started emerging a few years ago around sort of 2019 there were toxicology labs here in the UK including here in Birmingham in fact where they started testing very early on for nitizine so the advanced testing around nitizines that we've had here in the UK has meant that we have in certain places anyway been able to track them perhaps better than other European nations but on top of that also drug related deaths in the UK have been rising now year on year for several years for more than a decade so perhaps in that context it's not too much of a surprise to see nitizine deaths being so high in the UK.

[00:06:20] Speaker 1: And what else can be done to tackle this?

[00:06:22] Speaker 3: Well if you speak to drug experts and charities they will point to a number of things that can be done. The first is making the antidote for these kinds of overdoses the overdose medication naloxone more widely available. They point to more drug testing services becoming available as being one of the key ways to prevent nitizines from harming people and also they want to see a move from criminalisation of drug use to more legal regulation that's something that the global commission on drug policy who we heard from a moment ago that they want to see but this is a complicated and evolving problem there are many new nitizines which have emerged even in just the last few years from the original cases that we heard of maybe five or six years ago so it is a difficult problem to try and resolve.

[00:07:08] Speaker 1: This will be an eye-opening report really shocking for many. Navtej really good to have you with us thank you.