CHASING AN ANSWER

Olwen McKenzie is now in her 80s, but when she was a young woman she lived
in Sydney's Kings Cross. "It was quite bohemian, just like a little
Greenwich Village really," she says. "Lots of writers and journalists, and
gorgeous little boutique shops that sold hats and gloves."

That was 1948. Things have changed.

"I left the Cross to raise six children and when I returned, in the late
1980s, I couldn't believe what I found," McKenzie says.

"It wasn't sly grog shops any more. It was high-grade heroin. Brothels and
prostitutes. Garish, girly bars, the Pink Pussycat, and in every second
doorway, a vile spruiker. And the place was absolutely flooded with pushers,
people using drugs in the street, lying around in pools of vomit and urine,
taxis being used as mobile brothels. I can't explain how disgusting it is."

Now, if you have been to the Cross but not, say, since the Sydney Olympics
last September, you might now be thinking: oh, come on, it's not that bad. A
bit gangsterish maybe, a little risque. But you would be wrong. Kings Cross
is, in the year 2001, a sea of human decay.

"If you don't believe it," says 32-year-old Linda Stewart, who serves
sandwiches to Kings Cross hookers on Monday nights, "you should go and see
for yourself."

So I do. It's 7pm on a Monday, and I've just parked the car in a back lane,
behind Darlinghurst Road. Thirty-five seconds later, a girl, about 15, takes
a shot of heroin and buckles over into the gutter.

"She's taken too much," whispers Stewart, who is in her usual spot outside
the Pink Pussycat, "but we can't call an ambulance."

Can't, because the paramedics will give the girl Narcain to save her life,
and then she will sit up, furious that her shot (heroin) has been wasted.

"If she drops, I'll call one," says Stewart.

But the girl doesn't drop. Eventually, she sits up in the gutter, groaning.
Later, she can be seen picking her teeth with a hypodermic that had fallen
into the street.

"See, she's OK," says Stewart.

In Kings Cross, OK is a relative concept. All around, girls are pouring
(struggling, shaking, trembling) up from the strip clubs into the street.
Tourism in the Cross is down, so the prostitutes have to tout for business.
The first one out is almost naked, rake-thin and blue from bruising. She has
what looks like hickies on her face, but it's smack sores (raging, infected
acne that permanently marks the skin). She can barely stand, her head is
bobbing this way and that, and her eyes are boring into people, imploring
them: "Want a girl? Want some fun?"

The people walking past mostly look appalled - although, of course, some are
laughing.

I turn to a bouncer and say: "Who has sex with these women?"

"Mate," he says, "what they do down there, I don't know, and I don't care.
They're junkies. They don't live long."

Australia has a drug problem. This is something about which everybody
agrees. It is also getting worse. Heroin killed 958 Australians in 1999, up
from 737 in 1998. So something must be done. This, too, is something about
which everybody - the government, the opposition, police, treatment
professionals, the drug users themselves - is in vigorous agreement. But
what?

In an attempt to find some answers, the New South Wales Government held, in
May, 1999, a historic drug summit. For the best part of a week, drug users
and their families, police, priests and parliamentarians thrashed out the
issue and came up with 172 ideas. The most controversial was the plan to
open Australia's first legal heroin-injecting room.

According to the plans, clients of the injecting room (who must be over 18,
not pregnant and not first-time users) will be registered, then led up the
stairs to wash their hands, collect their needles and candles and inject
their own heroin. If they collapse, staff will call an ambulance. If they
don't, they can relax for a while, then leave. The centre will operate eight
hours a day, during an 18-month trial.

Not, though, if Malcolm Duncan has anything to do with it. A barrister
employed by the Kings Cross Chamber of Commerce, Duncan will today ask the
NSW Supreme Court to rule the licence for the injecting room invalid.

"We'll be telling the court the location (at 66 Darlinghurst Road) is all
wrong," Duncan says. "Basically, it's going to bring more druggies to the
Cross."

What makes him think so?

"Well, I did some research," he says. "I picked up a girl, a druggie, and I
paid her to come here, $800 for four hours. I was joking to a friend: she
earns more than I do. I did a rack of lamb. It was probably the first decent
meal she had for ages. I said to her, `Do you think this (the injecting
room) will make people take more drugs?', and she said, `Sure."'

And so he was convinced?

"Not just because of her," says Duncan. "It's not just her that thinks that.
You should talk to Animal."

Animal?

"Animal. Raymond Nelson. He's a biker, and he hangs out at the Cross. He
knows everybody, and everybody knows him, and he's completely opposed to the
injecting room."

Duncan gives me Animal's telephone number. But before I call it, I call Dr
Ingrid van Beek, who will run the injecting room.

Van Beek is an expert in the treatment of heroin addiction. That said,
neither she or anybody else in the field is particularly good at treating
heroin addiction. There are more heroin addicts in Australia now than ever,
and more dead than ever. The war against heroin is not being won.

"In one sense, what we do (at the moment) is quite immoral because we give
drug addicts needles to inject, then they go off and do it," van Beek says.
"Sure, they won't die of AIDS one day in the future. But they might die of a
drug overdose, right here and now. Surely we should try to save some of
them."

Van Beek accepts that injecting rooms represent a significant shift in drug
policy. In the language of policy makers, it is a radical move away from
treatment and prevention (which many people say does not work) towards harm
minimisation (which others say will make the problem worse).

"Look, I understand this is a big, big step for people to take," van Beek
says. "People say it will send young people a message: it's OK to take
drugs, we'll look after you. But I think, if it does send a message, it is:
we haven't given up on you. We want to give you more time, more chances to
get off.

"I understand Mr Duncan is running a court case on behalf of people who
oppose it, and that's frustrating, because it just means more lives are
being lost while we battle this out."

Among those fighting to have the injecting room closed before it opens is
the aforementioned Animal, who lives on the sixth floor of a collapsing
housing estate in Waterloo, the kind where every light is set into the
ceiling, under a perspex cover, so the bulbs don't get broken. There are
three cars in the car park, and two of them have broken windows. Animal has
a motorcycle workshop in his loungeroom. There are five people sitting with
him, and all are chain-smoking. It's incredibly hot, and there are about 700
rolls of Christmas paper standing against a wall. I assume they are stolen.

"Stolen?" says Animal. "They're for the Christmas run."

Animal wrapped 18,000 presents last year, and gave all of them to the poor.
He also does charity work for hospitals, takes sick kids for rides on his
Harley-Davidson, and is vehemently opposed to the injecting room.

"The injecting room is gonna be the nodding-off room; that's all it'll be,"
he says. "It's gonna be a roomful of people, stoned off their heads, with
some do-gooder sitting opposite them saying, you know, you gotta get off
this stuff. And meanwhile, dealers are gonna be hovering around the place,
selling more drugs."

On hearing that a legal challenge to the injecting room would be launched,
Dr Andrew Byrne, who operates a methadone clinic in Redfern, virtually
collapsed in despair.

"I just don't understand it," he says. "What cogent reasons do they have?"

Well, many businesses in the Cross have signed a letter objecting to the
injecting room at its proposed location. Some of these people are clearly
addled. Conspiratorial "Pete", a bloke who sells nylon knickers out of the
back of his car to prostitutes, says: "I notice they're not supplying the
heroin, so the people running it must be connected to the drug trade."

The Uniting Church is a front for pushers? "Sure, wouldn't surprise me," he
says. "Hitler invented heroin, you know. Kept his soldiers in line."

But they're not all mad. Andrew Strauss, the owner of Blinky's Photo Shop,
which is next door to the proposed injecting room, is level-headed, and
livid. "We're already have a needle exchange, which has made our problems
much worse, because there's people shooting up all over the place. An
injecting room will just attract more drug dealers, and therefore users," he
says.

In truth, this is almost inevitable: the dealers and users will still be
there (what is the point of an injecting room without them?) and the users
will still be robbing people and selling sex, to pay for drugs.

Of course, they will also be alive.

"Heroin isn't a poison. It isn't like alcohol," Byrne explains. "If you
drink a bottle of whisky, you might die. But if you take 10 grams of heroin
(an enormous overdose) and are given an antidote, you'll just wake up. It's
a remarkable thing to see: a person can be blue, comatose; you inject them
and within five minutes they're having a sandwich and a cup of tea. Well,
actually, they're not, because they shoot out of the hospital, looking for
another shot."

According to estimates accepted by both sides, the injecting room will save
about five lives a year. If successful, more injecting rooms will presumably
open. (The Victorian Parliament baulked at a plan to open five in Melbourne,
but is watching the NSW case with interest.) Each will cost about $500,000 a
year to run. What the chamber of commerce wants to know is: Would that
$500,000 be better spent on treatment that helps get five people off heroin,
rather than providing a place to have it?

"What needs to be remembered," Byrne says, "is that this is a trial.
Obviously, a trial raises questions. Is it worth doing more widely? How many
lives will be saved? How much illness will be prevented? All very reasonable
questions to ask, and only after a trial could one fairly start to answer
them."

In the meantime, he says, "Most of my folk (patients) have overdosed and
some have sustained permanent damage. [When heroin addicts overdose, they
often fall into comas, land strangely, and so circulation to their limbs is
cut off.] One has crutches and loss of use of one leg; one has lost all the
fingers (of one hand) and half his dominant thumb. Another died in the
public toilets next to my surgery in Redfern Park last year. He would have
likely lived if there was an injecting room."

For people like Byrne, the legal battle is particularly frustrating because,
when the drug summit ended, they thought the argument had been won. And, in
many ways, it had. In passing enabling legislation, the NSW Parliament has
prevented the chamber of commerce from arguing that the injecting room
should not open on moral grounds, or by putting up a case that it would not
work. Instead, the legal battle will likely turn on the definition of
"acceptable support" and "community". Malcolm Duncan will argue that, since
neither the chamber of commerce nor the Kings Cross Community Centre
supports the plan, the injecting room does not, as required by law, have the
acceptance of the surrounding community.

Back at the Cross, Linda Stewart has packed up her food van. She wants to
get a coffee and introduce me to some drug users. "You should talk to some
druggies, because they're all opposed to the injecting room," she says,
signalling to a homeless person.

He is pleasant enough, but I can barely stand to speak to him, so
overwhelming is the stench. His mouth is full of teeth like burnt matches.
He takes drugs about once a week and, to Stewart's dismay, says he might use
an injecting room.

"See, once I dropped in the street and I guess I would have died but my mate
called an ambulance. He also went through my pockets and took my 70 bucks,"
he says. "I can't have a go at him because he saved my life. But I guess
that wouldn't happen (in an injecting room)."

"That's not uncommon," shrugs Stewart. "You see people rifling through
pockets while they're giving mouth-to-mouth."

Among those watching proceedings today, if not in person, then in spirit,
will be NSW Premier Bob Carr, whose younger brother, Greg, slipped into a
coma after a shot of heroin and died in 1981. Although reluctant to speak
about the injecting room, Carr has, in the past, admitted he was torn in
half by the debate, and still has doubts.

In a thoughtful speech given after the drug summit, an exhausted Carr said
he had reached the view that, for most people, life was an inherently
disappointing experience, and some people could not cope with that. Taking
drugs, he said, was their way of compensating for the "mediocrity of
existence".

"There will be fluctuations in drug use but, in the meantime, some
supportive policies will ease people through a period of maximum risk," Carr
said.

He understands that the Federal Government is opposed to the plan (John
Howard has described the proposed injecting room as regrettable) but thinks
NSW voters are with him.

"The people of NSW are roughly where I am," Carr said. "They don't want to
do anything which is going to make the situation worse."