A prescription drug used to treat epilepsy is claiming an increasing number of lives across the UK.
Pregabalin—normally prescribed by GPs to treat nerve damage—has been implicated in over 800 recent drug misuse deaths, analysis by The Epoch Times has found.
Figures obtained from the latest drug poisoning statistics for England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland show the prescription pill has been increasingly listed as either a cause, or contributing factor, in deaths across all four regions.
Experts say the substance is being sold for as little as £1 a pill on the street, alongside a mixture of potent imitations cooked up in backstreet labs from as far away as China, before being shipped for illicit sale in the UK.
A batch of the epilepsy drug—said to be four times stronger than normal—is currently being hunted by one police force following the deaths of three people in just one weekend.
Five other people suffered cardiac arrests after taking tablets from the pregabalin, in Derry, Northern Ireland last weekend, according to the Police Service of Northern Ireland.
On Tuesday, newly released figures reported how the number of people dying from drugs in Scotland has decreased for the first time in five years.
However, the statistics revealed an alarming rise in deaths linked to pregabalin.
Deprived Areas
Annemarie Ward, CEO of addiction charity Faces and Voices of Recovery (FAVOR) UK, said rises in the abuse of prescription drugs is being seen most in the poorest communities.“If you look at the drug death statistics that have just recently come out in Scotland, as well as last year, we can see that that rise of prescription drugs play an equal part if not more than the illegal drugs,” she told The Epoch Times.
“The lives that are being lost is devastating, it is pain and a burden that all communities share but primarily our poorest communities are sharing that burden the most.
“In Scotland, we saw that you are 16 times more likely to die if you stay in one of our communities and I am sure that is the same in other parts of the UK as well.
“It’s absolutely catastrophic and devastating.”
According to drug death figures from all UK regions in 2021, Scotland had the highest age-standardised rate of drug-misuse deaths at 25.0, Northern Ireland had the second highest rate at 9.4, and England and Wales had a rate of 5.3 deaths per 100,000 population.
In England, the North East—which recorded the most deprived households in the 2021 census—has the highest rate of deaths relating to drug poisoning and drug misuse for the same period, at 163.4 deaths per million people and 104.1 per million, respectively.
Mother’s Campaign
In Northern Ireland, where drug-related deaths involving pregabalin have risen consistently since 2013, a community is backing the fight of one mother whose daughter died from taking the prescription drug earlier this year.Jasmine Duddy was just 21-years-old when she passed away in February leaving behind her three year-old son Theo.
“You can get drugs here quicker than you can get a bar of chocolate,” Ms Duddy told The Epoch Times.
“Jasmine was never prescribed the drugs she died from, she got them from street drug dealers.
“I didn’t even know that it (pregabalin) was the drug that killed her until months after she passed away, when we received the results of her post-mortem.”
Ms. Duddy said her daughter, who had fallen into “the wrong crowd” when she was 16, had previously received rehabilitation help for addiction issues.
Just before her death, she had been attending a help group, along with her mother and was determined to stay away from drugs.
“I’ll never know why Jasmine decided to take those tablets,” she said.
“Her little boy, who is just three, now will never remember his mummy. All I can do now is fight so that other families don’t go through this pain.
“That’s why I launched the petition which calls for those who deal drugs to people who then die to be charged and prosecuted with murder.”
Ms. Duddy said a stronger deterrent is needed to stop the scourge of prescription drugs.
“I can’t do this on my own and the reason I’m doing this and speaking out is to save some other young person’s life. My daughter’s gone, she’s not coming back.”
Lockdown Rise
In 2019, the government reclassified pregabalin as a Class C controlled drug after increasing demand and growth for it on the illicit market.It meant that only those with a signed doctor prescription were legally allowed to carry the gabapentinoid drug.
And on the streets, addicts began substituting a lack of, or poor quality, heroin during lockdown with the tablets.
Labelled as the prescription “drug of choice” for users on the streets by outreach workers who spoke to the report authors, the demand for pregabalin grew due to its ability to enhance the effects of other drugs and its price.
Professor Robert Ralphs, a lecturer in criminology and social policy at Manchester Metropolitan University, and one of the authors of the GM Trends annual report, said Pregabalin is available for as little as £1 on the streets.
He told The Epoch Times: “There’s a range of reasons why people would take it, one of them being that it’s cheap—you can buy it for as little as a pound a tablet.
“When you have a bag of heroin for 10 pounds and it’s not really quality, pregabalin is a lot cheaper.”
The professor added: “What we had with COVID, because the heroin quality went down from around 20 to 40 percent purity to as low as as 2 percent. So people were topping up on that at night.
“If you take the pregabalin then it delays the withdrawal or they take it when they want to sleep.”
Mr. Ralphs added: “If people were on a methadone script, that kind of holds them but they don’t really get any any buzz off that, but if they take pregabalin on top then it gives them more of an effect. The same with heroin.”
The professor found during his research that more and more black market versions of the drug was being offered on the streets.
Some of which are three times more potent than those prescribed by doctors.
He said: “With pregabalin typically they are sold as 300 milligrammes, and the ones that we were testing over the last few years, it only actually contained about 100 milligrammes of pregabalin, so only a third of the strength.
“But the ones we’ve been testing this last year, they’ve been more like 300 milligrammes.
“So, again, if someone usually taking ten or 20 tablets a day, and usually the tablets they buy are 100 milligrammes and then they suddenly get a batch with 300 milligrammes, that causes problems.”
