DRUG DEATHS SURGE

PEOPLE ARE DROPPING LIKE FLIES

- BY MARK McGIVERN

DEADLY new super-strong opiates are causing addicts to "drop like flies" as overdose deaths run out of control, drug campaigners have warned.

Communities are now being preyed on by drug gangs who are lacing heroin, cocaine and street valium pills with new and lethal compounds such as nitazenes, which can be 500 times more potent than heroin.

The mixes have brought a terrifying new face to the street drug scene.

Annie Brown, who runs the Patchwork Recovery Community, in Kilmarnock, said users have reported pills and powders that look and smell different and have deadly effects.

Annie said the landscape has shifted so dramatically that users now believe that almost all drugs are laced with ingredients that could be fatal.

She said: "We have certainly entered a new phase in the kind of drugs being circulated and the damage being caused.

"Our service users have been shocked at the increase in deaths. They say people have been dropping like flies in recent months.

"The people who use drugs still take them because they think it won't happen to them.

"But they have no doubt that these nitazenes are coming into heroin supplies because they can tell by looking that the product is very different to before."