28 March 2025
More news today showing pain management in Australia is an afterthought by the Australian Government for Australian patients with ongoing shortages of opioid medications used for chronic non cancer pain, cancer pain and palliative care of our children and loved ones!
How can this be allowed to occur, when the Government was warned years ago that the crack down on opioid over-prescribing would result in reduced global manufacturing? This would then bottleneck supply and there would be critical shortages as a result.
Tasmania however, produces nearly half of the world's demand for the poppy. In 1994, scientists tweaked the genetics of thousands of plants to engineer a “super poppy” that was particularly rich in opiates. The plant produced higher yields of thebaine, a chemical precursor for making oxycodone which more than halved the costs of making oxycodone. Farmers planted the first commercial crop of 'Norman' poppies in 1997, just as Purdue Pharma in the US aggressively ramped up production of OxyContin, its patented oxycodone pill.
Farmers producing the best crop of the year with the highest yields of drug compounds were given cash incentives, luxury cars such as Mercedes-Benz's, BMW's and holidays, by a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson one of which was Tasmanian Alkaloids. Both were sold off in 2016 at the peak of the opioid crisis in the US.
So again, patients are forgotten with no forward thinking or planning by the Australian and State Governments who lobbied internationally for the licensing to grow the crops here in Australia, decades ago!
Why aren't we making our own opioid medicines here in Australia?
What would you do if pain management was unavailable to you, or your son, daughter, mother or father either because of refusal by doctors/pharmacists/Pharmaceutical Services Board or shortages in stock? I can tell you from personal experience it is incredibly distressing and traumatising for everyone involved, and will result in more hospitilsations and suicide, ultimately costing the Government and therefore taxpayers more.
Thank you to everyone for your ongoing support of my petition, but we need many more signatures to really make anyone in Government listen and act on the harms which patients like my husband are living each and every day.
Please pass the petition on to partners, friends, family and work colleagues and remind everyone, we will all need pain management at some point in our lives.