Liverpool Echo Special Report: As batches of highly potent and hugely dangerous synthetic opiates circulate in the region, those trapped in addiction on the streets are staring death in the face each time they use.

“It was like the exorcist, my body was rejecting everything. Then I woke up in the hospital.” These are the words of Paul. He’s 46, homeless and has been using heroin for the past decade. Last week he was moments from death. He came to smoke the drug as he does most days, but immediately felt something was different. “As soon as I smoked it, it was like a whole different world,” he explains. He says he began violently projectile vomiting like he had never done before, before losing consciousness and waking up in the Royal Liverpool Hospital, having been taken there by his cousin.  Paul, who is originally from Huyton but now beds down in Liverpool city centre each night, believes he is one of many victims of a contaminated batch of heroin that has been circulating in Merseyside and is linked to two deaths and many overdoses, largely within the region’s homeless and rough sleeper communities.

The Echo first revealed in late April that the dangerous drugs were present in the region after they were linked to the death of a 62-year-old man in Southport. Earlier this month we reported on a second linked death in the Wirral area after the contaminated batch was discovered there. A man has now been charged with drug offences linked to the investigation into the contaminated batch. The Cheshire and Merseyside Drug Local Information System has confirmed that a batch or possibly multiple batches of heroin have been located in the region, with forensic testing identifying the synthetic opioid etonitazene, a highly toxic, synthetic benzimidazole opioid, in the supply. This substance is part of the wider nitazenes group, which are far stronger than heroin -sometimes 100 times stronger – and dramatically increase the risk of overdose and death.

Paul says the drugs he consumed in Liverpool city centre just over a week ago contained nitazenes. “I was in hospital for two days. I was close to dying. It wasn’t through injecting, it was through smoking. So I reckon it was laced with something. Nitazenes are the worst. I know it was that, because the day before I was fine after smoking three or four things. The next day I smoked one and it was game over. When they did the blood test I think they said it was those nitazenses. They said I was a very lucky man.” Paul’s harrowing near-death experience has obviously left him scared to take what he believes to be heroin again, but like other addicts, he finds himself in an impossible and dangerous situation.

“When you go through something like that you feel terrible, but then you go and take it again because you have to,” he explains with a grimace. “I actually need it to make me better because the withdrawals are so bad.” Paul, who says he became homeless when his marriage broke down ten years ago, says he is desperate to get clean but is finding this almost impossible while living on the streets in Liverpool, where drugs and drug-taking is all around him. He says he best way for him to get clean now would be to get himself into prison, adding: “You actually get more help in prison. It’s the safest place for me. I get three meals, a warm bed and it’s harder to do drugs. Because every time I take it now I’m scared, but I need to take it. That’s the risk I have to take.” He’s far from the only one in this terrifying position.

Elsewhere in the city centre, Jimmy, Kyle and Shaz are talking about the contaminated drugs and the worries they now have. Kyle says he has been homeless on and off since he was a kid after coming through the care system. Asked if he is a heroin addict he smiles and asks: “Does a bear s*** in the woods?” He’s angry at the dealers who are now bringing these dangerous substances to the streets and putting him and his friends in grave danger. “Once you are immersed in addiction, this is just part of it,” he explains. “If the drugs are contaminated and you end up with it then you take that chance. It’s hundreds of times stronger with those nitazenes, that’s what kills you.” He adds: “The problem is, when you buy a bag of heroin, you don’t know what’s in it. These dealers are just greedy b*******. There is no need for them to do this.”

The three friends are currently living in a large tent in the city centre. 31-year-old Shaz, who is walking with crutches due to a leg injury, tells us she has been on the streets since she was 17. Originally from Ireland she also came through the care system before her life spiralled out of control. She is now fearful of what each hit of heroin could mean for her. “I know people who have died,” she tells us. “But it is what it is when you are an addict. You are taking that risk. I am a user. It is quite scary but it is a risk that we have to take when you are an addict and you are rattling” (suffering from withdrawal symptoms).”

Mark Whitfield is an associate professor in substance abuse at John Moores University. He explained more about the dangers of the nitazenes that have made their way into the Merseyside drug supply. He states: “Nitazenes are a group of highly potent synthetic opioids that have emerged in recent years in the illicit drug supplies, mainly as adulterants. So they will particularly be in Heroin but will appear in things like benzodiazepines as well. Part of the reason they are potentially appearing more is because of the reduced purity of Heroin in recent years, which has been affected by the reduced supply of heroin coming from Afghanistan. So we are seeing more synthetic substances appearing in traditional drugs without people realising. The issue is that they are significantly stronger. We know that some variations are potentially over one hundred times more potent than heroin, so only a small amount would be needed to cause an overdose.”

So the risks are huge. But for those trapped in the cycle of addiction on the streets of this region, they are risks they feel they have to take. Shaz, who has been a user of heroin on and off for 15 years adds: “When you are rattling then you are taking it, simple as. If it is a bad batch, then that’s on you. We know it’s a chance we are all taking. We are just trying to survive.”

Special report: As batches of highly potent and hugely dangerous synthetic opiates circulate in the region, those trapped in addiction on the streets are staring death in the face each time they use repots the Liverpool Echo.

“It was like the exorcist, my body was rejecting everything. Then I woke up in the hospital.” These are the words of Paul. He’s 46, homeless and has been using heroin for the past decade. Last week he was moments from death. He came to smoke the drug as he does most days, but immediately felt something was different. “As soon as I smoked it, it was like a whole different world,” he explains. He says he began violently projectile vomiting like he had never done before, before losing consciousness and waking up in the Royal Liverpool Hospital having been taken there by his cousin. Paul, who is originally from Huyton but now beds down in Liverpool city centre each night, believes he is one of many victims of a contaminated batch of heroin that has been circulating in Merseyside and is linked to two deaths and many overdoses, largely within the region’s homeless and rough sleeper communities.

The Echo first revealed in late April that the dangerous drugs were present in the region after they were linked to the death of a 62-year-old man in Southport. Earlier this month we reported on a second linked death in the Wirral area after the contaminated batch was discovered there. A man has now been charged with drug offences linked to the investigation into the contaminated batch. The Cheshire and Merseyside Drug Local Information System has confirmed that a batch or possibly multiple batches of heroin have been located in the region, with forensic testing identifying the synthetic opioid etonitazene, a highly toxic, synthetic benzimidazole opioid, in the supply. This substance is part of the wider nitazenes group, which are far stronger than heroin – sometimes 100 times stronger – and dramatically increase the risk of overdose and death.

Paul says the drugs he consumed in Liverpool city centre just over a week ago contained nitazenes. “I was in hospital for two days. I was close to dying. It wasn’t through injecting, it was through smoking. So I reckon it was laced with something. Nitazenes are the worst. I know it was that, because the day before I was fine after smoking three or four things. The next day I smoked one and it was game over. When they did the blood test I think they said it was those nitazenses. They said I was a very lucky man.” Paul’s harrowing near-death experience has obviously left him scared to take what he believes to be heroin again, but like other addicts, he finds himself in an impossible and dangerous situation. “When you go through something like that you feel terrible, but then you go and take it again because you have to,” he explains with a grimace. “I actually need it to make me better because the withdrawals are so bad.”

Paul, who says he became homeless when his marriage broke down ten years ago, says he is desperate to get clean but is finding this almost impossible while living on the streets in Liverpool, where drugs and drug-taking is all around him. He says he best way for him to get clean now would be to get himself into prison, adding: “You actually get more help in prison. It’s the safest place for me. I get three meals, a warm bed and it’s harder to do drugs. Because every time I take it now I’m scared, but I need to take it. That’s the risk I have to take.” He’s far from the only one in this terrifying position.

Elsewhere in the city centre, Jimmy, Kyle and Shaz are talking about the contaminated drugs and the worries they now have. Kyle says he has been homeless on and off since he was a kid after coming through the care system. Asked if he is a heroin addict he smiles and asks: “Does a bear s*** in the woods?” He’s angry at the dealers who are now bringing these dangerous substances to the streets and putting him and his friends in grave danger. “Once you are immersed in addiction, this is just part of it,” he explains. “If the drugs are contaminated and you end up with it then you take that chance. It’s hundreds of times stronger with those nitazenes, that’s what kills you.” He adds: “The problem is, when you buy a bag of heroin, you don’t know what’s in it. These dealers are just greedy b*******. There is no need for them to do this.”

The three friends are currently living in a large tent in the city centre. 31-year-old Shaz, who is walking with crutches due to a leg injury, tells us she has been on the streets since she was 17. Originally from Ireland she also came through the care system before her life spiralled out of control. She is now fearful of what each hit of heroin could mean for her. “I know people who have died,” she tells us. “But it is what it is when you are an addict. You are taking that risk. I am a user. It is quite scary but it is a risk that we have to take when you are an addict and you are rattling” (suffering from withdrawal symptoms).”

Mark Whitfield is an associate professor in substance use at John Moores University. He explained more about the dangers of the nitazenes that have made their way into the Merseyside drug supply. He states: “Nitazenes are a group of highly potent synthetic opioids that have emerged in recent years in the illicit drug supplies, mainly as adulterants. So they will particularly be in Heroin but will appear in things like benzodiazepines as well. Part of the reason they are potentially appearing more is because of the reduced purity of Heroin in recent years, which has been affected by the reduced supply of heroin coming from Afghanistan. So we are seeing more synthetic substances appearing in traditional drugs without people realising. The issue is that they are significantly stronger. We know that some variations are potentially over one hundred times more potent than heroin, so only a small amount would be needed to cause an overdose.”

So the risks are huge. But for those trapped in the cycle of addiction on the streets of this region, they are risks they feel they have to take. Shaz, who has been a user of heroin on and off for 15 years adds: “When you are rattling then you are taking it, simple as. If it is a bad batch, then that’s on you. We know it’s a chance we are all taking. We are just trying to survive.”

Some Neighbourhood Policing teams in the North East are carrying emergency shelters, known as Sleep Pods, to help the homeless, reports the BBC.

Durham Constabulary has been given 100 Sleep Pods to provide temporary shelter to people sleeping rough and helping protect them from the elements. Officers can distribute the pods to vulnerable people they meet and record their location to share with local support services. Matt Foggin, PCSO with Bishop Auckland Neighbourhood Policing Team, said the initiative had been effective as a first step. He said: “We can put that intervention into place and hopefully that person is a little bit safer for that night until mainstream services can get involved.”

The Bishop Auckland Neighbourhood Policing team started working with local homelessness charity, Cornerstone Supported Housing and Counselling, about a year ago. The charity is a regional distribution hub for Sleep Pods, and regularly gives them to individuals across County Durham and Hartlepool who are sleeping rough. The pods allow them to mark individual locations and set up continued support.

Sleep Pod, the charity behind the emergency shelters, donated 100 units to Durham Police for officers to hand out in April. Each of the 21 neighbourhood policing teams carry between three and five pods. Nicky Morson, communication and support lead at Cornerstone, said this partnership offered an exciting step forward in confronting the issue of homelessness. “The whole point of the police carrying Sleep Pods is to give people they are finding, who are rough-sleeping, an option,” she said. “Before, if they hadn’t been too naughty, they couldn’t get locked up – or if they weren’t poorly enough, they couldn’t go to hospital. And they were left. But with a Sleep Pod, they can be sighted.”

PCSO Foggin said, previously, officers would try to support individuals to return to their families, or anywhere else where they could stay among friends, but found that in some cases – due to offending behaviour – the people who found themselves homeless had “burnt all [their] bridges”. Now the police are able to distribute Sleep Pods, those isolated individuals can stay safe, and officers can notify Cornerstone to provide additional support. He said the carrying the pods gave officers peace of mind, “The benefit is knowing we can do that little bit extra. We are the neighbourhood policing team, so it is for the community – we make people safer and, hopefully, reduce crime and offending behaviour.”

Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham has previously called for ‘change’ in the Labour party. What does he want that change to look like? The Big Issue speculates.

Andy Burnham might have found a new route to parliament after Makerfield MP Josh Simons resigned to give the Greater Manchester mayor the opportunity to challenge Keir Starmer for Labour leadership. As Starmer’s popularity continues to plummet, some Labour MPs are reportedly looking for an alternative leader. Such designs have long-centred on Greater Manchester’s mayor, who has previously called for “change” in the Labour Party and openly criticised Starmer’s leadership. But the two-time leadership candidate would need to return to parliament first.

It was thought that Andrew Gwynne’s departure from his Gorton and Denton seat would offer Burnham the chance to become an MP again but Starmer and the National Executive Committee blocked him from standing. That decision saw the Green Party’s Hannah Spencer take the seat. But there are no such practical hurdles to stop the so-called ‘King in the North’ plotting a Westminster return this time around after Starmer confirmed he wouldn’t stand in Burnham’s way. Announcing his intention to stand, Burnham said: “There is only so much that can be done from Greater Manchester. Much bigger change is needed at a national level if everyday life is to be made more affordable again. This is why I now seek people’s support to return to parliament: to bring the change we have brought to Greater Manchester to the whole of the UK and make politics work properly for people.”

In the spirit of said speculation, we at Big Issue have asked experts: What would Andy Burnham’s Britain look like? Here are some of the key policies he’s implemented in Manchester, and how they could be rolled out elsewhere.

Burnham’s flagship homelessness policy is Housing First: giving rough sleepers a permanent home immediately, with wraparound support, rather than making housing conditional on sobriety or other criteria. Since Greater Manchester’s pilot launched in 2019, more than 450 people have been housed, with an 88% tenancy sustainment rate. Rough sleeping in the city has fallen by more than 57% since 2017, bucking the national trend.

“I started using the phrase housing is a human right, when I’d come back from Finland,” Burnham told the Big Issue in a 2023 interview. “People kept talking about Housing First and I kind of thought it was a project. But it actually came over to me when I was there that housing first is a national philosophy in Finland. If people talk about prevention, if you want a true prevention policy for the country, you give everybody a good, secure home. So, it’s not an unrealistic policy, I think it’s a very realistic policy and I’m really committed to it.”

Gideon Salutin of the Social Market Foundation says the numbers back Burnham up. “It’s one of the rare homelessness interventions with a very strong evidence base,” he tells Big Issue. “Internationally, tenancy sustainment rates are consistently above 80%, and Greater Manchester’s results match that. The costs of providing housing and support are outweighed by savings to health services, criminal justice and emergency accommodation.”

But a national rollout would be a major undertaking. In 2021, the Centre for Social Justice estimated that there were 1,995 Housing First places available in England, with between 16,450 and 29,700 places required. “If Burnham were prime minister and made Housing First a national philosophy, as Finland has, we could dramatically reduce rough sleeping within a decade,” Salutin says. “But it would take serious long-term investment and a coordinated building programme – without that, the model can’t work at scale.”

On housing more broadly, Burnham has called on the government to borrow £40 billion to build new council housing. “We’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond markets,” he said.

MORE than one in three Scots are worried they could lose their home within the next few years, according to new polling that highlights mounting anxiety over Scotland’s housing and homelessness emergency, reports deadlinenews.

The research found 35% of people across Scotland are concerned about losing their home because of pressures including the cost of living, a lack of affordable housing, high rents and rising mortgage costs. Concern is highest among 18 to 24-year-olds, where almost half (49%) share that fear. Concern about housing insecurity remains elevated well beyond the youngest age groups, with 45% of 25 to 34-year-olds worried about losing their home in the coming years, followed by 42% of 35 to 54-year-olds.

The issue is also being felt across Scotland’s cities and regions, with concern highest in Glasgow at 41%, followed by Inverness at 37%. In Aberdeen and Dundee 32% of Scots are worried about losing their home in the next few years and 31% of people in Edinburgh. The findings came in polling commissioned for the Everyone Home collective, an expert group of more than 40 expert organisations focused on housing and homelessness in Scotland.

Homeless Network Scotland, who convene the collective, said the findings show housing justice must be a central concern for the new administration, with growing public sentiment reflecting the scale of the country’s housing emergency. Margaret-Ann Brünjes, chief executive at Homeless Network Scotland, said: “These figures confirm that housing insecurity is no longer a fringe issue, it is a weight on the minds of people across Scotland. Younger generations, in particular, feel increasingly locked out of the stability they need to build their lives. Voters are sending an unmistakable message: homelessness and housing must be treated as urgent national priorities. While these issues are appearing in party manifestos, the level of ambition shown so far falls short of the radical action this emergency demands.”

Around 250,000 people are currently on housing waiting lists across Scotland, while more than 17,000 households, including around 10,000 children, are living in temporary accommodation according to Everyone Home, a coalition that unites third and academic sector expertise with lived experience knowledge of the issue. Everyone Home’s Housing Justice manifesto called for a significant increase in social and affordable house-building to reverse those trends. Research commissioned by The Scottish Federation of Housing Associations, Shelter Scotland and the Chartered Institute for Housing found Scotland must deliver 15,693 new social and affordable homes every year to reduce homelessness. The collective warned that failure to act is costing the public heavily, with some local authorities now unable to meet their statutory duties, and forced to spend hundreds of millions of pounds on unsafe and unsuitable temporary accommodation – with a knock-on impact on wider council spending.

Brünjes said: “Homelessness is the harshest consequence of Scotland’s housing emergency. Our broken system is failing far too many people and causing untold harm. Housing justice means fixing that system so everyone has access to a safe, secure and affordable home. The human and financial cost of inaction is rising every year, and it is taxpayers who are footing the bill for a system that is being forced to rely on temporary fixes instead of long-term solutions. We are spending public money managing crisis rather than preventing it. That is why Scotland needs not only more homes, but better joined-up support across housing, health, justice and social care to stop people falling through the cracks.”

The collective is also calling for full and effective implementation of new homelessness prevention measures and proper resourcing for frontline public services to identify housing risks earlier and allow intervention before crisis point. The expert coalition said prevention must become a central pillar of housing policy if Scotland is to reduce pressure on councils, the NHS and wider public services. Brünjes added: “We know what works. Prevention, early intervention and joined-up services can stop homelessness before it starts – but only if they are properly funded and delivered. This election is a major opportunity for all parties to show they understand the scale of the housing emergency and are prepared to meet it with the ambition required.”

The polling comes as housing and homelessness campaigners urge political parties to commit to stronger action ahead of the 2026 Scottish Parliament election, with calls for housing justice to sit at the heart of the next parliamentary term.