Speaking to newspaper i, Henrique Luz Rodrigues, president of Infarmed, said the authority had been taken by surprise by the spike in painkiller-taking.
Opioid drugs are obtained from opium and work on the nervous system, reducing pain.
They have long been used to tackle pain caused by illnesses such as cancer or degenerative diseases like fibromyalgia or arthritis, when common painkillers no longer work.
However, the pills can be addictive, which requires extra care in their consumption.
Mr. Luz Rodrigues said when it comes to strong painkillers, “it is worrying in as much as we must learn from the mistakes of others”, in reference to other countries such as the USA, where overdoses associated to opioids is an epidemic that kills some 15,000 people every year.
Based on consumer trends mapped last year, Infarmed is set to analyse the phenomenon in a bid to comprehend what has changed in the prescription of opioid drugs, and if new guidelines are needed, echoing work conducted by its American counterpart the FDA.
Figures supplied to newspaper i by Infarmed show a “sustained growth over recent years.”
In 2011 Portugal bought 1,513,435 boxes of strong opioids that have molecules that can include morphine but also potent substances such as fentanyl, which last year the American anti-drug association DEA said is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.
In 2015 their consumption in Portugal had shot up to 2,567,703 boxes and last year, up until September, the tendency for growth continued with a rise of 13 percent in comparison to the first nine months of 2015.
“It is a sharp rise and there are substances in which consumption has more than doubled,” Henrique Luz Rodrigues noted, stressing one of the objectives of Infarmed’s analysis of the trend is to determine whether the growth is being spurred by cancer patients or non-ontological situations.
This being because the risk of dependency is much higher in the latter case, when taking opioids can go on for longer periods.
“With continued taking they lose effectiveness, which sometimes leads to reinforcing dosages” he warned.
The Infarmed president underlined there are no known cases of overdoses associated with fentanyl in Portugal
Another of the national drug authority’s chief concerns is the association of opioids with the taking of anxiolytic drugs like Xanax.
“We have a high consumption of benzodiazepines in this country and data from the epidemic in the United States tells us that the risk of overdose quadruples in these cases”, he said.