Painkiller addict died after buying pills online
A SCOTTISH charity worker addicted to painkillers died after she was ‘disgracefully’ able to order controlled drugs online, an inquest heard yesterday.
Debbie Headspeath, 41 purchased dangerous quantities of dihydrocodeine from online pharmacies because she was not getting enough to meet her addiction from her GP.
The hearing was told she hoodwinked the pharmacies’ doctors into giving her repeat prescriptions by claiming she did not have time to visit her own GP.
Miss Headspeath, who worked for a charity helping veterans with sight problems, collapsed and died on July 28, 2017, at her home in Ipswich, Suffolk.
The hearing at Suffolk Coroner’s Court in the town heard her death was due to complications from pancreatitis, most likely caused by her addiction to codeine.
Her GPs first prescribed her dihydrocodeine, described as a weak opiate 10 per cent of the strength of morphine, when she suffered back pain in 2008.
But as her use of the drug continued over the years, her doctors became increasingly concerned and tried to wean her off it.
Miss Headspeath, who was originally from Edinburgh, borrowed £10,000 to pay for drugs from 16 online suppliers in the six months before she died, often getting prescriptions from multiple outlets at the same time. As there was no central register of prescriptions due to patient confidentiality, online pharmacies were unable to check if she was already being prescribed the drug.
Miss Headspeath’s mother Elaine Gardiner criticised the sysget tem, saying it was ‘unacceptable’ patients could buy addictive drugs online without their GP knowing.
Mrs Gardiner, from Edinburgh, told the hearing: ‘It’s disgraceful that someone like my daughter can go to 16 different pharmacies and order an addictive drug and it just like that. There have been many deaths from this. I am just wondering if lessons have been learned from my daughter’s death and those like it.’
Mrs Gardiner said she tested the system after her daughter’s death, completing an online questionnaire to get the same drugs and got as far as being asked for payment details. She described the process as ‘very easy’.
Mrs Gardiner also questioned Dr Nigel Savage, the chief medical officer for Nationwide Pharmacies, which supplied her daughter with £750 of drugs over six months.
She told him: ‘If someone is addicted to something, they are not going to tell the truth. It is someone who you don’t know, who you have never met and you don’t know their medical history.’
Dr Savage said Miss Headspeath failed to disclose she was getting drugs elsewhere, and pretended she was trying to reduce her dose. He said: ‘It was the sort of thing a doctor would want to hear.’
The inquest heard how Care Quality Commission rules for online pharmacies had since been tightened so they could only supply opioid drugs to a patient after first contacting their GP.
Her main GP Dr Peter Burn said he was ‘horrified’ in 2011 when she admitted she was buying large quantities of an over the counter painkiller containing Ibuprofen and small amounts of codeine to increase her dosage. As a result, he increased her prescription of dihydrocodeine to stop her taking the additional painkiller, and then gradually reduced it every week to try and wean her off gradually.
He also urged her to seek addiction treatment but as she had mental capacity he could not force her to do anything.
Senior coroner Nigel Parsley recorded a narrative conclusion that Miss Headspeath’s death was a direct result of the ‘unco-ordinated availability of codeine from multiple prescription suppliers’.
‘Many deaths from this’