WILL INJECTING ROOMS WORK?

Prime Minister John Howard is dead against supplying heroin to
addicts. Drug expert David Penington is convinced the idea should be
tried. Once, Adam Holt and Tamara Sims would have agreed with Dr
Penington. Now they are not so sure.

"I used to pray they'd introduce heroin trials," Mr Holt, a
35-year-old former addict, said yesterday.

"Now I thank God they never did. It has enabled me to take the right
avenue to get my life back into my hands. If there were injecting
rooms or a heroin trial I might still be using heroin."

Mr Holt was addicted to heroin for 14 years. He said he spent almost
$400,000 on the drug, trashed his father's house and sometimes
resorted to theft. Mostly he worked as a laborer, chasing hits after
work and sleeping at building sites or on the beach. It was never much
of a life, yet his attempts to give up invariably failed.

"One time I remember vividly. I was in bed for three days. I couldn't
even get out to go to the toilet. There were all these cans of
beetroot and tuna. That was all I was living on."

Late last year, Mr Holt underwent a detoxification program.
Afterwards, he was "lucky" enough to be admitted to Odyssey House
where roughly 70 recovering drug users live and undergo counselling
aimed at helping them deal with the problems underlying their drug
use.

Ms Sims, 36, started using heroin soon after her mother died. She was
17 at the time, alone and responsible for a younger brother.

After the birth of her fourth child two years ago Ms Sims went on a
rapid detoxification program. She suffered a relapse soon afterward.
In April she booked into Odyssey House.

Ms Sims said the key flaw with drug treatment in Victoria was the
waiting list facing users who had undergone detoxification but still
needed counselling. "They've jumped one hurdle, overcome the physical
pain of withdrawing. It just seems pointless that you're sending them
back out into the street. They've gone through the pain but they
haven't broken the mental addiction," she said.

A social worker contacted by The Age yesterday told of one young drug
user who underwent detoxification eight times in one year. She
relapsed every time, partly because of the wait of up to six weeks for
a bed in a residential rehabilitation program.

"If someone is making that step you've got to help them," Ms Sims
said. She said she did not support legalising marijuana but thought
injecting rooms might help save lives. Nevertheless she admitted that
a friend who died of an overdose just two weeks ago would never have
thought to seek out an injecting room.

Mr Holt said injecting rooms were likely to attract dealers and crime.
He said he felt terrible about the things he had done while on heroin.
"I was scamming, doing rorts and thefts. I hated doing that. I went to
Scotch College and had a really good moral upbringing."

Mr Holt said heroin trials might suggest it was all right to use
illegal heroin in injecting rooms. "You've got to turn around all the
old behaviors that people accumulate. That just can't happen with
heroin trials. You're not even scratching the surface of the issues."