SHE'S 24, AND A SERIAL DRUG OVERDOSER: SHE'S SUNK ABOUT AS LOW AS SHE CAN GO

I've seen the needle and the damage done. - Neil Young

So here she is again. Flat out on a footpath in South Melbourne,
lank-haired, slack-jawed and dozy, her eyes - when she can manage to keep
them open - ink-black pin pricks surrounded by emptiness. Doing her
personal best to crank up the latest heroin overdose statistics. And maybe
to kill herself.

When the accommodation shelter workers came running five minutes ago she
was unconscious and barely breathing. But somehow they've slapped and
shaken her back to the surface.

An ambulance officer tugs up a shirt sleeve to take her blood pressure and
she jerks away hard. "F--- off," she slurs, "Don't give me no f---in'
Narcan," not wanting the anti-narcotic that will cancel out the overdose
and, she fears, destroy her hit and leave her hanging out for more.

For 30 minutes she rages, oscillating between four-letter fury and pathetic
self-pity: no one loves her, no one wants her, no one cares. Then she
lurches away towards the city on the arm of her male friend, walking
rubber-kneed like someone on a boat in a bad sea.

Unable to do any more, the ambulance officers and the three policemen who
have been called in watch her go. They suspect - they know - that it won't
be long before they see her again.

Since the start of the week, Metropolitan Ambulance Service paramedics have
chased a spate of heroin overdoses across Melbourne: more than 50, one
fatal. A purer-than-usual batch of the drug has been blamed. But in one
sense, it seems, this shambling, tragic young woman shares some of the
responsibility.

Just 24 and already sunk about as low as she can fall, she is a serial OD
victim.

On Monday ambulance officers responded to a dozen overdose call-outs, three
of them to her. On this shift, Wednesday, they'll see her three more times.
"Mate," the friend claims, "she's had 27 ambulances in the last two
months."

Today Steve MacKenzie attends her first. Burly and laconic, an ambulance
officer for 13 years and a Mobile Intensive Care paramedic for more than
four, he operates the MICA 301 Commodore from the ambulance service's
central branch at St Vincent's Hospital. He's cruising Fitzroy at 4.21 pm
when the call comes in. Signal One - lights and siren - to a suspected
overdose near the corner of Russell and Bourke Streets.

"Mmm, yeah, that'd be it," he says. "The classic location."

Four minutes later, he pulls the sedan to the kerb outside an amusement
parlor in Russell. Another ambulance is already there. Its crew, Rob Paton
and Paul Golz, are on their second OD call of the afternoon.

"Another sad story," says Paton later, "She'd just got out of prison, it
was her birthday and someone bought her a hit for a present. Some friend.
We brought her out of it with Narcan."

This time they're comforting a rag-doll-limp girl slumped near the gutter.
She's in a dirty T-shirt and denim cut-offs and one of her sneakers has
come off. Her face is ashen and her pupils are constricted to tiny, dark
dots.

When she sees MacKenzie's car she begins to struggle. "It's the coppers,"
she says, "the bloody coppers." It takes the three officers and her friend
to keep her down, under a withering tirade of abuse. A crowd gathers to
watch the show.

"Whattaya all laughin' at," she yells. "Don't treat me like I'm some
spastic idiot." Then, abruptly, she quietens, becomes almost reflective:
"Yeah, I'm on heroin, I'm stoned. I'm an idiot for that. But I'm not a
f---in' fool, am I?"

The friend, doleful, lanky and crew-cut, in tracky-dacks and top, says
later that they'd scored in one of the parlors, then gone around the corner
to use. Maybe five or 10 minutes later she tipped over. She won't let
MacKenzie give her the anti-narcotic Narcan and under ambulance protocols
he can't force the issue, but she agrees to go to St Vincent's.

As MacKenzie pulls out, he sees another young girl, probably only 16, on
her haunches against the wall of one of the parlor, struggling against
nodding off. "We'll probably be back for that one soon," he says,
incorrectly as it turns out.

"You know, sometimes you feel like a vulture sitting in a tree, cruising
around and waiting for someone to keel over."

Back at the hospital, the friend is waiting. She was thrown out of her
accommodation that morning, he explains, and he's worried what she might do
next. "I'm scared she'll walk out of here with nowhere to go, no one to
look after her and she'll go score again. That's what she wants to do I
reckon, she wants to kill herself, f--- up again."

But he doesn't believe a pure batch of heroin is doing the rounds: "People
put that around so people'll buy more, you know? - `Come on down, there's
pure gettin' around'. . . `Grouse', let's go.' - It's just a load of
hogwash. It's just normal gear, but some are bigger than others and that's
why people drop.

"Maybe they've missed out a day or something and they go out and have some,
they've been hangin' out and they score that big one and over they go."

Take, for example, the young bloke in MacKenzie's next call, a 6.0 1pm
Signal One to an unconscious male, possible cardiac arrest, in Easey
Street, Collingwood.

A six-day-a-week laborer, about 25, the mud and cement still on his boots,
he was on his way home from work with a mate. They had a few beers and
stopped off in Smith Street to score, says the mate. Haggled the dealer
down to $20, nicked down an alley to shoot up and were driving home again
when he slipped into unconsciousness. "I shook and shook him, but I
couldn't wake him up. I s--- myself."

He's come around now and is sitting in the passenger seat, scared, dopey
and beaded with tiny pearls of sweat. He agrees to a small dose of Narcan.

He says it's the first time he's OD'd. "I'm a small-time user, I don't want
to get addicted. I use bugger-all: sometimes maybe three times a week then
maybe not for three or four weeks at a time. I feel quite embarrassed about
this, to tell the truth."

His mate, a regular user, overdosed last September and admits he "arced up"
after being revived with Narcan: "I took on the ambo guys. They had to call
the cops and all, and it took four blokes to hold me down. I feel pretty
bad about that - they saved my life and I attacked them."

Reactions after being dosed with Narcan differ, says MacKenzie. "The
majority say thanks. The odd one wakes up, abuses you for ruining their hit
and you don't know if they're going to pull a knife or come swinging at
you."

This victim is more typical. "Hey, thanks very much for your help," he
says. Seems like a nice young bloke, though you have to wonder about the
baseball bat and 25-centimetre bowie knife on the car floor.

MacKenzie says overdose victims often don't fit the junkie stereotype.
"They're not all scozzers. They can be professionals who use every so
often, they can be people who just enjoy a beer and a shot of heroin,
that's their recreation. They could be young, good-looking girls with good
jobs who've used because it's trendy and ended up dying.

"That's the most frustrating thing. You'll go and find a young person who's
dead from shooting up heroin and there's a life that had so much potential
and it's gone.

"Then sometimes you might have a `save', you get a pulse and they're
breathing. But they've had so little oxygen to the brain for so long
they've ended up with massive brain damage. And one other thing that gets
frustrating is when you go and see the same patients again and again and
again. And you just wish they'd wake up and learn."

Paramedic Rob Blaikie, 38, operating MICA 302 from the Epworth Hospital in
Richmond, suffers that frustration at 7.35 pm. Bouncing from one cancelled
call at Flemington to another on the Clarendon Street Bridge, he's
redirected to another, just around the corner in South Melbourne. It's the
girl from Russell Street again.

She had discharged herself from St Vincent's and headed back to bot some
clothes at the emergency accomodation she'd been evicted from that morning.
Along the way she had had another hit and collapsed on the footpath. When
shelter staff got to her she was out to it and the smack had reduced her
respiratory function to two or three breaths a minute.

Awake now, alternately weeping and cursing, she claims she's "weaning"
herself off the stuff. "I'm down to three or four caps a day. Last week it
was eight. I'm so f---in' paranoid I won't even take me Panadol."

But less than two hours later it's all Signal One bells and whistles and 90
kmh down tram tracks from Windsor to a call at the Casino. And here she is
again.

She's on her back on the floor of the food court, glassy-eyed and
surrounded by casino medical staff and unimpressed bouncers. The friend has
surrendered to the inevitable and left her to her demons. She's quieter
this time, perhaps a little frightened, perhaps simply exhausted. Again she
refuses the Narcan, but asks to be taken back to hospital.

At 10.30 Blaikie's rolling again, to a report of an unconscious youth,
probable overdose, possible cardiac arrest, in the toilet at Richmond
Railway Station.

But as he turns into Swan Street the call is cancelled. A bystander pokes
his head through the car window: "I just rang to tell you blokes not to
bother," he says. "He woke up and went.

"I've done a St John's course so I knew what to look for. He was right out
of it and I rolled up his sleeve to look for tracks. Mate, their was blood
running down his arm and dripping down his leg.

"But then he just jumped on his pushbike and took off. He's long gone."

Gone, gone. The damage done.