21 deaths you haven’t heard about
Welcome back to Inside the Big Issue. I’m senior reporter Greg Barradale .
Good morning. 284 people have died, all from a single cause. But you probably haven’t heard about it. They were all killed by nitazenes.
What on Earth is a nitazene, I hear you ask? As a Taliban crackdown reduces heroin supplies, dealers and chemists are turning to synthetic opioids to keep business flowing. Nitazenes, a powerful type of synthetic opioid, are filling the gap. They are deadly, linked to at least 284 deaths in the UK since June 2023. A global story is playing out on the streets of the UK. Heroin users, many of them homeless, are dying after accidentally taking drugs laced with nitazenes. But little attention is being paid.
That’s why I’ve spent the past few months investigating the depth and human toll of the UK’s nitazenes crisis. In this week’s Big Issue magazine, you can read the first part of that investigation: a deep dive into 21 deaths in Birmingham last summer which passed under the radar.
As I learned more and more – speaking to experts, chemists, hostel managers, and policy workers – I grew astonished how little attention had been paid to what happened in Birmingham. Within the city, it had been an intense emergency among public services and health agencies. But it’s hard to imagine another localised tragedy – that number of people, all dying for the same reason – being, essentially, ignored by the country at large. It felt like a story the public should know about. And yet, few of these authorities wanted to talk about it in detail.
My journey to find out what happened took me to a leafy street in Birmingham, and to the well-worn kitchen table of Judith Yates. Yates, a retired GP, took coffee out of her freezer, brewed it, and showed me something extraordinary: a database of all those who’ve died in the city from nitazenes.
“I think it’s extraordinary how little people do take an interest in who has died," she said. “These are all individual people who died, I think every person should be counted.”
Every death, she believes, can be prevented – but only if we talk about what happened and learn the lessons. But, as deaths swept the city, did Birmingham’s authorities do enough?
From Yates’ kitchen table, the story stretches to homeless hostels, a dingy coroners’ office, hospital toxicology labs, street corners, and the corridors of Westminster. Pick up this week’s magazine and discover the crisis sweeping the UK.
The story continues beyond the magazine. All this week on BigIssue.com we’ll be dropping the other parts of the investigation, and there’s more to come in next week’s issue.
Inside this week's Big Issue
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In case you missed it
A quote from Carol Vorderman which didn’t quite make it into last week’s cover feature: “I used to live in a huge penthouse on the River Thames, opposite the Houses of Parliament. You’d go ‘what’s the time?’, even sitting on the toilet you were looking at Big Ben. I’ve nothing to defend, made a lot of money, hosting everything on ITV and all that, very successful in that way. But I lived that life and I actively chose then not to.”?
My Pitch
“I’ve been selling Big Issue for three months. I’m really loving it. I’ve got my proper pitch now,” says Bradley, who sells the magazine outside the Shell garage in Bristol’s Eastville Park. “I used to beg here before, then someone from Big Issue came down and asked: “Do you want to sell the magazine? You’ll be working, you’ll make money, you’ll enjoy it.” I said, “I’ll give it a go,” and they gave me the job.
“It’s better to be working, not begging. I’m earning money, so I wake up happy. I feel better for it.”
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