SAFE DRUG INJECTION SITES INEVITABLE, ADVOCATE SAYS

Australian Urges Vancouver Residents To Follow A Route That He Pursued In
Sydney

If governments don't open a safe drug-injection site in Vancouver, parents
and advocates will take the law into their own hands and do it themselves,
says an Australian who did just that in his own country.

"Civil disobedience will force the issue," says Tony Trimingham, a
parent who was involved in the opening of such a site in Sydney,
Australia, two years ago with a coalition of people who were
distressed and outraged by government inaction.

Trimingham is in Vancouver for three days to bring local groups
glimpses of Australia's battle over drug strategy. His visit is being
sponsored by the Carnegie Action Project, at a time when the city is
debating a new drug strategy.

He said Vancouver is only a few years behind Sydney in the drive to
tackle its drug problem.

This city has one of the key elements for change, he said -- a group
of middle-class parents whose children are involved with drugs and who
are not willing to stand by while they die in alleys one by one.

"It's middle-class people who lead things, which has both positives
and negatives," says Trimingham.

He believes the move to look for other ways to deal with drugs than
zero tolerance has come about as drugs have moved into middle-class
families around the industrialized world. Those families are far less
willing to tolerate having their children treated like anonymous
degenerates who don't deserve health care, understanding or tolerance.

That middle-class activism is one of the forces that has produced
change in Australia, a force that Trimingham harnessed when he went
public with his grief four years ago after his own son died at 23.

In March 1997, Trimingham wrote about his son Damien for the Sydney
Morning Herald. The article, accompanied by a photograph of an
attractive boy with a lock of hair falling over his face, painted two
dramatically different pictures of the same youth.

One was about someone who died with a needle in his arm in the car
park of a hospital -- "a drug-ridden no-hoper using taxpayers' money
to fund a sordid habit that ended his life suddenly." But it also
described a bright young man who had been a prize-winning athlete, a
musician, a writer, and a loved friend and son.

Trimingham's willingness to write about his son publicly and his call
for a radical change to drug policy unleashed a wave of reaction from
families that had been suffering silently with similar problems.

Today, the former owner of a business that cleaned office machines
heads a government-funded group called Family Drug Support that
provides information and help-line counselling to families, and also
pushes for changes to drug laws and drug treatment.

That 1,800-member group, along with some churches, social agencies and
health workers, has pushed hard for more harm-reduction approaches as
Australians have debated drug policy intensely over the last few years.

That debate has been prominent as the drug crisis has escalated, with
Australia now recording the highest proportion of drug-overdose deaths
- -- about 1,500 a year -- among all the countries that keep statistics.

After watching various levels of government seesaw and hesitate over
taking action, the coalition that Trimingham was a part of opened its
own illegal safe-injection site for users at a chapel near Kings
Cross, one of the large open-air drug markets in Sydney, to force debate.

Although they shut it down after three weeks, that was enough to
produce some action, he said.

Next month, Sydney will open the country's first legal safe-injection
site for an 18-month trial near Kings Cross. It has the support of the
neighbourhood residents and the local Chamber of Commerce.

Two other sites that had been proposed, one in a primarily aboriginal
neighbourhood and one in a neighbourhood dominated by various Asian
groups, have been put on hold because of community opposition.

But Trimingham believes once those communities see the benefits of the
Kings Cross safe-injection site, they'll come asking for their own.

He said he has noticed it's particularly difficult for families from
Asian cultures to accept harm-reduction efforts, even though members
of their community are involved in both dealing and using.

"They are dead against it, even though they have the worst drug scene
in Australia. But there's such shame about it in their culture."

Trimingham understands that. He felt the same way, to the point that
when he used to question his son about whether he was using drugs, it
was easier for him to accept Damien's lies -- "Oh no, Dad, you know
I'd never do something stupid like that" -- than push for the truth.

But, like all the other families in his support group, he's come to
the point where he changed his priorities.

"When you start out, the first goal is getting them to stop. But
eventually, that becomes about goal number seven. First is keeping
them alive. Two is maintaining communication. Somewhere further down
is maybe reducing or substituting."

Trimingham said there isn't a parent alive who wants a child to be
using drugs. The message his group advises parents to give is: We
don't like what you're doing, we don't understand it, and we're
scared, but we accept it and we want you to keep talking to us and to
take care of yourself.

After all, as Trimingham points out: "Once they've died, there's no
treatment."

Trimingham is speaking to the Vancouver Board of Trade's drug task
force in an invitation-only meeting today; at the Carnegie Centre at
noon on Wednesday, and at 7 p.m. the same day at St. Mary's church in
Kerrisdale, 2490 West 37th Ave.