MEET AISHA

Aisha Dow is a young Australian multimedia journalist based in Albury-Wodonga, twin cities on the border of Victoria and New South Wales. She reports for award-winning daily newspaper The Border Mail and also files stories and online updates for major Fairfax mastheads, including The Age. She has recently been named Young Journalist of the Year at the prestigious Melbourne Press Quill Awards for a portfolio of stories including reports exposing a deadly black-market trade of prescription patch fentanyl.

Read more about the Quill award here.

Aisha Dow with her Quill award, after being named Young Journalist of the Year in March 2013.

Aisha’s willingness to venture outside major metropolises have given her opportunities to report on stories that cover full gamut of the Australian experience, in a place where sometimes kangaroos are found hopping down the main streetand bushfires and floods ravage the countryside.

After graduating university in Adelaide with a double degree in international studies and journalism, Aisha got her start as a cadet journalist and photographer at The Transcontinental, a weekly paper in the desert town of Port Augusta.

Within the space of a year and a half she rose from cadet, to senior journalist and then editor of The Transcontinental and another weekly paper based in the remote mining town of Roxby Downs, The Roxby Downs Sun. During that time she was nominated as a finalist for three 2011 South Australian media awards. Her explosive stories shedding light on a long-running saga of bullying and understaffing at the Port Augusta Hospital earned her a nomination for best print news report, the only young or regional journalist to make this category.

Among Aisha’s biggest strengths are her versatility and enthusiasm to learn and challenge herself. With a notepad, pen and the art of shorthand she happily navigates journalistic past times of court and rounds reporting while delving into stories that demand you look back into the past. And as the media world speedily evolves, she is constantly gathering new skills for new ways of telling stories. Smart phone in hand, she produces rolling online coverage of breaking news events and video packages that tell a thousand words.

On this website you can find a selection of her best work and keep up to date with her latest projects.

Port Augusta Hospital Critical

Port Augusta Hospital Critical

 

Pensioners selling deadly painkiller to addicts: The Age

IT HAS become Albury-Wodonga’s deadliest and most desired drug. But you won’t find it being made in grubby warehouses or traded in shadowy alleyways.

Instead, it is handed over by pharmacists to pensioners for just a few dollars, and traded in a lucrative black market behind closed doors.

The painkilling patch fentanyl is called ”stickers” by those in the drug-using community on the Victoria-New South Wales border.

Detective Senior Sergeant Barry McIntosh said some pensioners were supplementing their welfare payments by illegally selling their medications. Photo: The Border Mail

Drug workers say that in the past 18 months at least eight Albury-Wodonga residents have died while abusing fentanyl, many of them seasoned painkiller abusers who thought they could handle even the most powerful drugs.

Addicts have been known to draw upon their best acting skills to convince doctors of their need for a prescription.

One Wodonga user, 27, said he faked a bad backache to get fentanyl, which he injected, before being discovered later, unconscious and turning blue.

Police have seen cases where users have bullied loved ones to give them their own painkiller patches, tablets and potions.

And if they can’t it get prescribed for themselves, they will find it via a growing black market supplied by those you would least expect – the frail and elderly.

Detective Senior Sergeant Barry McIntosh, of Wangaratta police, said some pensioners were supplementing their welfare payments by illegally selling their medication.

The trade seems to be becoming more organised, with criminals finding easy pickings in a community where it’s only a short step over the border to shop for a doctor who will give you what you want.

It’s a phenomenon that GPs such as Albury’s Michael Bartram are all too aware of. But Dr Bartram said it was not always easy to tell if they were being spun a tall story, and there was no reliable system to double-check whether the same patient had been prescribed the medication by another doctor.

One local drug worker told a recent Wodonga drug forum that gangs were recruiting elderly people to get prescriptions from their GPs for use in the local drug market, calling it ”fossil farming”.

A legitimate user of fentanyl in Albury said he had been approached outside chemists by people who had seen him pick up his prescription.

With a healthcare card, a packet of fentanyl costs $6 from a chemist, but single patches have a street value upwards of $100.

When the clear adhesive patch is used as intended, the drug is meant to be slowly released over three days.

However, canny addicts have discovered a way to extract the dose and inject it all in one potentially fatal hit.

The drug’s side-effects include slowed breathing and profound respiratory depression. Eventually a person may stop breathing all together.

Albury grandmother Naomi Allwork, 45, was one of the first in Albury-Wodonga to die in a spate of overdoses between the middle of last year and this year.

A coroner found she died of ”fentanyl toxicity”, multiple drug ingestion and heart complications on June 29, 2011.

Her daughter, Bernadette Williams, has since spoken out about authorities’ head-in-the-sand approach to the drug’s abuse.

Ms Williams said her mother had built up a tolerance to painkillers and turned to fentanyl ”looking for the next best thing.”

”Her body just kept on craving more until she couldn’t go any further,” Ms Williams said. ”It was the last straw.”

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/pensioners-selling-deadly-painkiller-to-addicts-20121018-27u1d.html#ixzz2IBNrmtdR