Grieving mother's warning over deadly Chinese opioid

When Claire Rocha received the results of her son Dylan’s postmortem, she had never heard of isotonitazene – the potent synthetic opioid that prematurely claimed his life.

- AMY-CLARE MARTIN

At up to 500 times stronger than morphine, even the most minute doses can prove fatal.

But Dylan, 21, had no idea the heroin he had received through the post was laced with the deadly substance when he relapsed after battling a drug problem linked to his depression. The talented musician’s sudden death in July 2021 is thought to be among the first fatalities in Britain caused by the substance – part of a dangerous family of Chinese synthetic opioids called nitazenes.

Now his grieving mother has issued a stark warning about the dangers of the drugs which are flooding Britain’s supplies – claiming lives of unwitting users after being detected in heroin, counterfeit prescription drugs sold as Xanax and even in some illicit vapes.

The Independent last month revealed nitazenes had been linked to an average of 6.8 lives each week in recent months as fatalities soar, with 176 lives lost in less than a year.

As she prepares to mark three years since Dylan’s death, Ms Rocha, 50, from Southampton, revealed she fears Britain is facing a US-style drug deaths epidemic if the nation does not wake up to the rapidly unfolding crisis.

“Dylan has that dubious claim to fame of being one of the first to die in England,” she told The Independent. “But now we are three years on and we have one person a day dying. It’s scary. And I think it’s probably only the tip of the iceberg.”