AUSTRALIA OPENS FIRST HEROIN INJECTING ROOM

Australia's first legal heroin injecting room, the largest "shooting
gallery" in the world, has opened its doors to drug users in Sydney's
red-light district despite opposition from Aborigines and local business
people. The 18-month trial in Kings Cross, an inner city area notorious for
prostitution and drug dealing, will aim to cut the country's drug overdose
deaths, which have soared from six in 1964 to 958 in 1999.

Since it was proposed two years ago, the injecting room has attracted
criticism from local people, the Australian prime minister and the Pope,
who sent a letter forbidding the Sisters of Charity order to run the
centre, where nurses provide supervision and sterile equipment for addicts
to inject drugs.

An Aboriginal elder lodged a complaint with the Land Titles Office last
Friday, claiming that the $A500,000 (?185,000) injecting room was close to
an indigenous burial ground. Uniting Care, the charity running the centre,
has 21 days to respond.

The controversial trial was originally intended to involve several other
shooting galleries, but two court challenges and divided public opinion led
New South Wales's Labor government to support a single centre.

The NSW premier, Bob Carr, whose brother died from a drug overdose, and the
police have backed the project, which is funded by money confiscated from
convicted drug dealers.

The local chamber of commerce, which lost a Supreme Court challenge to the
injecting room last month, claimed the centre was already exacerbating drug
use in Kings Cross. "As of the last 24 hours there's been an enormous
increase in the number of drug addicts and dealers in this area," its
spokesman Paul Haege said.

Local drug users last night welcomed the shooting gallery, which can offer
200 injections daily, but many said they had been scared off by media
attention. Just eight users stepped past waiting camera crews to enter the
centre on its first day.

"I think it's a good thing, otherwise there are people shooting up in the
gutters," said Helen. "But I wouldn't use it after last night when I saw
all my friends walking in there on TV."

She said she regularly witnessed about five overdoses a night in Kings
Cross and believed that the injecting room would definitely help cut
drug-related deaths. One in five drug overdoses in New South Wales occur in
the district.

Critics of the injecting room pointed out that it failed to stop ambulances
being called out to three overdoses in Kings Cross on its first night, but
the centre's staff appealed for time and space for the trial, the first in
an English-speaking country, to work properly.