TheChek News Flow

More drugs-related deaths of people aged 40-49 in 2016 than any other age group

People aged 40 to 49 who became addicted to heroin in the 1980s and 1990s had the highest mortality rates from drug-related causes in the UK last year.

In 2016 there were 108 drug-related deaths registered for every 1m people aged 40 to 49, up 14 per cent on 2015, according to figures released by the Office for National Statistics on Wednesday.

According to a report by Public Health England published last year, a “large proportion of heroin/opiate users” being treated in 2015/16 started using when the drug took off in the 1980s and 1990s. Now aged over 40, they are particularly vulnerable to complex health problems.

Rosanna O’Connor, director for drugs, alcohol and tobacco at Public Health England, called them the “Trainspotting generation” — a reference to Danny Boyle’s 1996 film about heroin addicts, and now depicting older heroin users “often with poor physical and mental health, [who are] sadly losing their battle with long-term addiction to drugs”.

By contrast, people aged 20-29 had a drugs-related mortality rate of 98 per 1m last year.

Deaths in this age group have increased since 2012, but are still far lower than at their peak in 2001, when they were the most vulnerable group.

Overall, registered drug-related deaths increased 2 per cent year-on-year to 3,744 — a high since records began in 1993.

Not all UK regions are equally affected: the North East had the highest drugs-related mortality rate, 77 per 1m people, compared with an average of 44 for England. In 2016, the drugs-related mortality rate rose 13 per cent year-on-year in the North East, against 3 per cent nationally.

More than half of all UK deaths involved an opiate, usually heroin or morphine. There was a rise in registered deaths involving fentanyl — a synthetic opioid more potent than heroin — from 34 in 2015 to 58 in 2016.

The National Crime Agency on Tuesday said 60 drug-related deaths in the UK since December 2016 have been linked to fentanyl or carfentanyl, a related and even stronger opioid.

Fentanyls were found in 50 deaths across the Yorkshire, Humber and Cleveland region since November 2016, said Detective Superintendent Patrick Twiggs of West Yorkshire police. He blamed supply from China and Hong Kong via the “dark web”.

Ian Cruxton, deputy director at the National Crime Agency, said drug dealers mixing synthetic opioids with heroin were playing “Russian roulette with the lives of their customers”.