Methamphetamine Australia: Preventing regular and dependent drug use need of the hour

More Australians have been using ice, or methamphetamines, in the past five years. Data from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre estimates that regular and dependent users have reached 268,000 people, up from 90,000 in 2011.

One of the most important actions that need to be taken right away is to find opportunities for early intervention so that transition to regular and dependent drug use can be stopped. The study said that early intervention strategies need to be developed by drug rehabilitation services so that young people can be stopped from trying methamphetamines in the first place.

“If we're going to prevent the kind of crisis that we saw with heroin, where we still have people who were teenagers in the 90s still dependent on heroin ... we need to intervene earlier and I don't think what we have now is ample,” said Matt Noffs from the New South Wales-based Ted Noffs Foundation.

The study was published in the Medical Journal of Australia on Monday. The researchers considered those to be regular users who had used the drug at least once a month during the past year. Dependent users were the ones with impaired control and who continued to take the drug despite negative consequences. They were categorised as a sub-group of regular users.

Treatment data for amphetamine dependence were examined for estimating user numbers. The researchers also examined amphetamine-related hospital separations data from 2002 to 2014. The separations data included methamphetamine patients who left hospitals due to discharge, death, transfers and signing-out, writes The Guardian.

“The previous discussions have suggested that increasing use has been among existing users of the drug who are just using more. But this data suggests that there is a new, young population initiating methamphetamine use and developing regular and dependent use, and the harms associated with that,” said Dr. Sarah Larney, one of the study’s authors.

The researchers, by using data multipliers based on population numbers, found that, in 2013-14, there were 268,000 regular methamphetamine users and 160,000 dependent users aged 15 to 54 years in Australia.