NSW: Heroin overdoes increase in Redfern
By Janine O'Neill
SYDNEY, Feb 11 AAP - Sydney police fear a bad batch of heroin has hit inner-city streetsafter an unusually high number of overdoses in just one day.
Redfern Superintendent Dennis Smith said police and ambulance officers were calledto five non-fatal heroin overdoses in Redfern's central business district yesterday.
"This is an unusually high number of overdoses in the area," Supt Smith said, addingthat they all occurred within a couple of kilometres of each other.
"We really want to alert people that the current heroin supply appears to pose an increasedrisk to users."
Supt Smith said police were currently gathering intelligence on heroin availability,purity and price in the area.
They would also interview the most recent victims, believed to be three men and twoyoung women, when their health allowed in a bid to determine the origin of the drugs theytook.
Supt Smith said when he was based at Marrickville there was maybe one overdose a week,but five in a day at Redfern was very unusual.
He could not comment on what the current batch was believed to contain, or if thisoutbreak of overdoses followed a shortage.
However, he did say police had "upped the ante" against drug dealing in the area.
"We've certainly been making it harder out there for drug dealers to operate," he said,referring to sniffer dog and Operation Vikings operations.
"Definitely in Redfern we've certainly upped the ante in terms of operations and highvisibility policing in our problem areas and our known drug locations.
"It's a prohibited drug, so we're certainly enforcing the rules, but this is also ageneral health alert that there is something in this current batch that is posing a severehealth risk."
AAP jo/nf/gl/de
KEYWORD: HEROIN
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