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Opioid painkillers

Opioid painkillers are medicines that may be prescribed short-term to help with moderate or severe pain relief. Some opiates, such as codeine, when combined at low doses with other painkillers like paracetamol, ibuprofen or aspirin can be bought over the counter in pharmacies.

Counterfeit medicines, which are purposely made to look like real ones, can be very hard to tell from real medicines. You can only be sure that an opioid painkiller is real if obtained from a pharmacy registered in the UK.

Some drugs are increasingly cut with dangerous synthetic opioids like nitazenes , which are killing people across the UK. This is happening in a wide range of drugs, including dodgy opioid painkillers. You can never really know what is in any street or counterfeit drug. It’s especially important to avoid falsified oxycodone tablets marked with “OP” and “40”, “OP” and “80” or “Percocet” as some have been found to contain nitazenes. Find out more about the risks and what to do here.

Also called:

  • Codeine
  • Morphine
  • OP 40s
  • OP 80s
  • Oxycodone
  • Oxycontin
  • Oxys
  • Percocet
  • Percs
  • Tapentadol
  • Tramadol

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