Malta among countries with high rate of drug deaths

Malta and six other countries had the highest rate of drug-related deaths in Europe among those aged between 15 and 39, according to an EU drug agency report.

While drug-related deaths accounted for three per cent of all deaths among Europeans aged 15-39 in 2003-2004 incidence exceeded seven per cent in Denmark, Greece, Luxembourg, Malta, Austria, the UK and Norway.

The report on The State Of The Drugs Problem In Europe, just launched by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, said the figures should be considered as minimum estimates.

The report is based on data from the 25 EU member states and Norway and, where available, from Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. Statistics related to Malta show that in 2003 there were five overdoses, another six in 2004 and 2005, and five in the first nine months of this year.

According to the report, in 2004 the majority of drug-related deaths in Malta involved young people whose mean age was 34 years. The majority (80.3) per cent were males.

In the period 1990 through to 2003, between 6,500 and over 9,000 drug deaths were reported each year by the EU countries, adding up to over 113,000 throughout the period.

EMCDDA director Wolfgang Götz said the agency was worried that the downward trend in drug-related deaths "may be faltering".

"The steady decline in acute drug-related deaths - mostly related to opiates - we saw from 2000 to 2003 has been replaced by an increase of three per cent," he said.

"It is too early to say if this represents a long-term shift, but it is of concern that 13 out of the 19 reporting countries recorded an increase of some degree."

On the subject of needle and syringe programmes for intravenous drug users, the report finds that Malta provides a staggering average of 210 syringes to every user each year (approximately four a week to each addict).

The coverage rates of needle and syringe programmes vary drastically in Europe - from two to three syringes a year for every intravenous drug user in Greece, through 60 to 90 in the Czech Republic, Latvia, Austria and Portugal, to about 110 in Finland and more than 250 in Luxembourg and Norway.

The report points out that there are many factors that are known to influence injecting frequency among those using drugs, including patterns of use, level of dependency and the type of drug used.

A recent study exploring the relationship between HIV prevalence and the coverage of syringe distribution suggested that behavioural factors, such as injecting frequency and personal reuse of syringes, strongly influence the level of syringe distributions required to achieve a substantial decrease in HIV prevalence.

Injecting drug users are at a very high risk of experiencing adverse consequences such as serious infectious diseases or overdoses.

It is encouraging that the prevalence of HIV infection remains low among injecting drug users in most EU member states.

In Malta, 80.5 per cent of drug users seeking treatment in 2004 reported problem use of heroin, with over 70 per cent injecting the drug.

It is estimated that in the EU more than half a million opioid users (mostly heroin) received substitution treatment in 2003; that represents one-third of the currently estimated 1.5 million problem opioid users.

After opioids and cannabis, cocaine is the drug most commonly reported as the reason for entering treatment - 5.8 per cent in Malta, with 15.2 per cent of these injecting the drug.

The report underlined the fact that heroin use and drug injecting will remain major public health issues in Europe for the foreseeable future, incurring long-term costs for European healthcare systems.