Expert warns of legal killer drugs NICK Buckley is worried. Dozens of new drugs will be approved this year and he knows there could be a killer among them. But there is no formal method of sharing data or tracking drug-related deaths. Professor Buckley, a medical toxicologist at the University of New South Wales, says one in 15 deaths in Australia is drug related and more people die from drug poisoning than from car accidents. He is leading a $7 million project to examine prescription drug reactions, medical and chemical poisonings and snake and spider bites. One of the drugs on his radar is a legal painkiller that goes by the street name hillbilly heroin. He says people are using it instead of heroin, but there is not enough information about how many people it and other legal drugs are killing. "We need the same approach as we have with the road toll," he says. But there is no monitoring once a drug is introduced, so we do not know where the black spots are. There are 1700 deaths a year from drug poisoning. That's more than one and a half times the road toll. It is unclear how many of the deaths are deliberate. Professor Buckley hopes better monitoring of coroners' cases, hospital admissions, prescription patterns and poison calls will allow him and others to quickly identify problem drugs. He says one of the worst killers to slip under the radar was the poisonous painkiller Dextropropoxyphene, which caused 10,000 deaths worldwide before it was banned in Europe and the US. It has still not been banned in Australia, but was taken off the PBS in 2000 and doctors have been warned to stop prescribing it.