Woman who took painkillers for a bad back turned to online pharmacies before ...

'Debbie was the love of my life. I loved her with all my heart,’ says Mike Kellard. ‘She was the kindest — and the happiest — person you could hope to meet. I had absolutely no idea this was going to happen.’

Mike’s life unravelled one July morning in 2017, when he got a call at work to say Debbie, 41, hadn’t arrived at her office.

Nor was she answering her phone. Mike went straight home, where he found Debbie Headspeath, his cherished partner of 20 years, lying dead. ‘She had her coat on ready to leave. She had collapsed shortly after I left for work,’ he recalls.

The cause of death, her family believe, was an accidental overdose of opioid painkillers.

‘Debbie had started taking over-the-counter codeine for back pain about ten years ago,’ says Mike, 54, a Post Office worker from Ipswich.

She then developed a dependency on the drug which initially she tried to deal with on her own — Mike says the couple only ever had one conversation about it, one night about four years before she died.

‘She told me she was addicted to painkillers and needed help. She then went to the doctor and he had devised a plan to supply her with reducing amounts of codeine. As far as I was concerned, that was happening.’

In fact, unbeknown to Mike, as well as prescription painkillers from her GP, Debbie was taking codeine she had bought online — after she died, he found that in the nine months before her death she had taken some 3,700 codeine painkiller tablets bought from 21 legal internet drug suppliers. ‘I believe she just couldn’t cope with the dose being reduced,’ says Mike. ‘She went online to get it. These suppliers operate outside this country and there’s apparently nothing you can do.’

Opioid painkillers can be ‘life-transforming’ for short-term pain, say experts. However, there have been growing concerns about their use for chronic pain — because the drugs often don’t ultimately work for this form of pain, and carry the risk of addiction.

This has led to demands for better guidance for GPs prescribing the drugs and better support for people trying to come off them, including a 24-hour helpline — calls backed by the Mail.

Following these calls, Public Health England (PHE) is reviewing prescription pill dependency, and campaigners hope this will lead to changes in guidelines from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) for opioids and antidepressants.

Yet as Good Health has discovered, another major problem is emerging, in the internet pharmacy free-for-all, with an uncontrolled supply of powerful, opium-based painkillers such as codeine and tramadol — highly addictive drugs that are chemically similar to the street drug heroin — readily available online.

So whatever any new NICE guidelines might say about when doctors should prescribe the drugs, patients can simply turn to the internet.

‘Even if doctors become restrained in their opioid prescribing, people will be able to go online to get more,’ says pain specialist Dr Cathy Stannard, widely recognised as one of Britain’s leading experts.

Owen Bowden-Jones, a consultant psychiatrist who leads Addiction to Online Medicine (Atom), Britain’s only clinic to help those affected by the issue, explains: ‘It really got going a year and a half ago. Patients would tell us they had been started on one of these drugs by their GP, who then said they couldn’t increase the dose.

‘The patients then started finding it online and were often surprised at how easy it was to obtain without prescription or speaking to their doctor. They would find sites that would post the medication next day.

‘There are online pharmacies where there is a pretence of screening and others supplying prescription medicines without any attempt at offering healthcare. A lot of them aren’t in the UK.’

As we have previously reported, most other European countries have prevented their citizens being prescribed drugs by a remote online doctor from another country in the EU. The UK Government has not closed this loophole, however, even though the number of people admitted to hospital here after overdosing on opioids has doubled to 11,500 a year in the past decade.

Deaths from prescription opioid painkillers are bundled up with those from heroin addiction by the Office for National Statistics, but fatalities from these two sources have soared to around 2,000 a year, a rise of more than 40 per cent in a decade.

An inquest into Debbie’s death is scheduled for May. The coroner, Dr Daniel Sharpstone, has asked for witness statements from the owners of all the websites that supplied her drugs. His inquest will also consider whether the circumstances of her death breached the European Convention on Human Rights, which requires the state to protect its citizens from harm.

‘If you investigate the sites, it’s apparent that if you say the right things you can get your prescription — and it’s quite easy to learn what to say,’ one of the coroner’s staff who did not want to be identified told Good Health. ‘The systems in place online for monitoring repeat prescribing seem very weak. Individuals can hop from one site to another.’

It is not clear whether inquest findings have much impact. Back in 2003, a 24-year-old Durham University physics graduate, Liam Bracknell, became one of the first online pharmacy casualties. Evidence at his inquest showed

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