INJECTING ROOMS: THE TRUTH

Here's Why They Won't Work

A destructive heroin wave is sweeping Australia. Our cities and towns
are awash in the illegal drug. Authorities estimate that 2300
kilograms of heroin, worth $3.4 billion on the street, are smuggled
into the country each year. According to the Alcohol and Other Drugs
Council, more than 330,000 Australians have tried heroin at least once.

To combat the scourge, scores of the nation's most powerful people --
politicians, academics and drug experts -- have lined up in favour of
government-funded heroin injecting rooms.

Under the plan, addicts would bring their illegal narcotics to these
rooms and shoot up under medical supervision, free from police
interference. Injecting rooms would get heroin off the streets, out of
the laneways and prevent the continuing degradation of neighbourhoods,
proponents argue.

In May last year, the New South Wales Government proposed an 18-month
trial of a heroin injecting room in the heart of King's Cross, one of
Australia's most crime-ridden suburbes. The experiment will be
supervised by the Uniting Church. Victoria and the Australian Capital
Territory have announced similar plans. Beginning in Sydney later this
year, with Canberra and Melbourne to follow, the trials are going
ahead, despite the prime minister's call for state governments to
shelve the controversial plans.

Support for supervised heroin injecting rooms may be well-meant, but
critics of the plan argue that it will increase rather than lessen the
dangers to drug users and society. Here are some of the myths and half
truths the heroin injecting room lobby has spread through the media
over the past year to sustain a determined campaign to legitimise the
use of one of the world's most dangerous drugs.

Myth 1: Supervised injecting rooms will save lives

Injecting-room staff who are trained in resuscitation techniques and
have on hand drugs such as Narcan -- which counteracts heroin's effects
- -- will save addicts who overdose, say the plan's supporters.

"Going by Europe's experience, the injecting room is likely to save
approximately 30 lives a year," argues Dr Alex Wodak, director of
Sydney's St Vincent's Alcohol and Drug Service, and a major proponent
of the plan.

Peter*, who was an addict and heroin dealer for 14 years, scoffs at
such arguments. "How can anyone predict that?" he says. "Heroin sold
on the streets can be tainted or stronger in purity than the addict can
tolerate, irrespective of where they're shooting up."

Major Brian Watters, former commander of, and now addiction consultant
to, the Salvation Army's drug rehabilitation programme who has worked
with addicts for two decades and is chairman of the prime minister's
drug advisory body, agrees. "If someone could prove to me that having
supervised injecting rooms saves lives, I'd be the first to support
them, but the evidence shows otherwise."

Watters points out that some 800 addicts die nationwide from overdoses
each year. As limited facilities will mean that only a small
percentage of addicts will use injecting rooms, only a handful of
deaths by overdose would occur among these users each year if they
injected in their homes or the streets. And there's no guarantee that
injecting rooms will save addicts from ultimately dying as a result of
their drug use. "Heroin can cause overdose and sudden death, despite
the presence of Narcan," he says.

Last year, the Reverend Ray Richmond, pastor of the Wayside Chapel in
Sydney's Kings Cross, defied the state government and opened the doors
of his church to addicts, providing them with a place where they could
inject "safely". The room was opened for just over a week before a
decision was made to close it, but soon afterwards an addict died of an
overdose in a toilet at the chapel.

Of concern to experts like Athol Moffitt, Q.C., the former New South
Wales Supreme Court judge who headed a Royal Commission examining
organised crime -- central to which is the illegal narcotics trade --
is the long-term harmful effect of sponsored injecting rooms. When
governments publicise the "safe" nature of these premises, Moffitt
says, they encourage nonusers who might otherwise be frightened by the
danger to try heroin. "If you take away the fear, more people will
begin to use it, and addicts will use it more frequently," he says.
"And more people are likely to die."

Says Mick Palmer, head of the Australian Federal Police and deputy head
of the National Council on Drugs, the prime minister's advistory body
on illegal narcotics: "Sooner or later someone will die in a 'safe'
room, and that will create public pressure on governments to provide
safe heroin," he says. "That's bad policy."

Myth 2: Supervised heroin injecting rooms will cut drug-related crime

Wrong. Even with the government sponsoring injecting rooms, addicts
who use them will still have to bring in their own heroin, an illegal
substance, which they buy off dealers at street prices. It takes
several hundred dollars a day to feed a hard-core heroin addict's
habit. To pay for it, users often thrust themselves into a life of
crime or prostitution, robbing and bashing innocent victims. As a
result, rates of violent crime and burglary in Australia have zoomed in
recent years.

According to a recent study by the Australian Institute of Criminology,
almost three-quarters of people detained by the police test positive
for illegal drugs. Seventy per cent of males held for a violent crime
test positive, as did 86 per cent of men held for property offences --
half of them for opiates.

Even in less-populated states, the rapid increase in violent crime is
directly related to heroin addiction. According to the Australian
Bureau of Statistics, in a three-year period, the number of victims of
armed robbery rose by 77 per cent in South Australia and by 99 per cent
in Tasmania. Total victims of armed robberies for Australia last year
were 10,850, with another 12,928 victims of unarmed robberies. The cost
of illicit drug-related crime to the community is a staggering $1.7
billion yearly, says Neil Comrie, chairman of the Australian Bureau of
Criminal Intelligence Board of Control.

I recently visited a government-financed and supervised injecting room
in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, praised as a model by supporters of
trial injecting rooms in Australia. Frankfurt's facility has been
operating for five years and has not reduced the area's serious crime
rate, among the highest in Germany. As with Australia, heroin is
illegal in Germany and many addicts there commit crimes to pay for
their habit.

"Mostly the men rob stores or passers-by with knives or steal bicycles
and car radios," says Josch Steinmetz, who runs the injecting room I
visited. "The women sell their bodies."

We can expect the same criminal activity by users of the Australian
injecting rooms, says Moffitt. "In setting up the rooms to be used by
people who rob and bash to get their illegal heroin, the governments
involved will themselves be aiding and abetting the breaking of hte
law, facilitating and condoning the committing of criminal offences,"
he says.

Myth 3: At heroin injecting rooms, addicts will respond to treatment
and rehabilitation

Unlikely. The four social workers staffing the Frankfurt injecting
room I visited were always ready to counsel the 600 addicts using the
facility each week and steer them toward rehabilitation courses. Though
at some point most addicts talk to social workers about available
programmes, their reason for using the facility is shooting heroin.
"When users come in, they're so eager to get their fix they find it
hard to concentrate on anything else, and afterwards they're so
euphoric that what you say doesn't register," says Steinmetz.

Myth 4: Establishing injecting rooms shows compassion for addicts

The Reverend Gordon Moyes, superintendent of the Wesley Mission, the
Uniting Church's welfare body, observes that such compassion, though
well-meant, is misdirected. "Supporters of injection rooms have opted
for a path of foolish compassion," says Moyes, who disagrees with his
church's role in administering the NSW trial.

"How can you claim you care for addicts when you signal you condone the
injecting that's devastating them?" says Watters. "Actively assisting
a heroin addict to inject his drug in the hope of weaning him off it is
like the government steering alcoholics towards pubs to wean them off
drink."

Myth 5: Injecting rooms are cost-effective and in the long run save the
community money

Wrong. It costs Frankfurt and the German state of Hesse more than $1.6
million yearly to run four injecting rooms that cater to about 1000
heroin addicts, or just 10 per cent of the city's estimated users. One
injecting room in Sydney is expected to cost around $1 million a year.
It will only cater for some 200 addicts currently injecting in public
around Kings Cross - a small percentage of the estimated 56,000
injecting drug users in Sydney.

So running, say, a dozen heroin injecting rooms in Sydney, Melbourne
and Canberra would cost millions of dollars of public funds for a
questionable purpose, says Moyes. "No-one can guarantee that addicts
would ever abandon their habit," he adds.

Myth 6: Injecting rooms will allow addicts some dignity

Anyone who has visited a government-sponsored injecting room in Europe
knows that there's no dignity in shooting heroin, wherever it takes
place. Media reports here have largely masked the horror, presenting
the injecting rooms as akin to coffee shops, where addicts effortlessly
inject their drugs and then sit back to enjoy the euphoria. Watters
calls this "the Disneyland fantasy."

At Frankfurt, the injecting room was bordered on three sides by a
stainless steel bench, waist-high, where nine addicts crouched facing
the wall. All were visibly suffering from malnutrition, stick-thin
with pasty skin, eyes deep-set and haunted.

I watched one man drop his trousers to reveal both legs swathed in
bandages to hide hideous sores caused by his addiction. For half an
hour he repeated plunged the syringe into his groin, because the veins
on his arms, neck and legs were unable to take any more puncturing. By
him a ravaged blonde in her thirties had another addict hold up a
mirror so she could guide the syringe into her neck. Angrily stabbing
her neck with the syringe again and again, she took 45 minutes to find
a section of vein healthy enough for the injection.

"When almost all the veins are too badly damaged to inject into, long-
term users must resort to injecting into their groins or necks,"
Steinmetz told me.

Myth 7: Law enforcement authorities will stop dealers from operating
near injecting rooms

That's like expecting bees to cease swarming around a honey pot. As I
approached the Frankfurt injecting room, I saw eight men and women clad
in baggy, dirty clothes, milling nervously in the street outside,
waiting their turn to enter. A dealer in a leather jacket openly moved
among them murmuring, "H, H, does anyone need any H?"

Kings Cross police have vowed to pursue dealers to the very doors of
the injecting rooms. But judging by their lack of success to date in
clearing the suburb's streets of dealers, a question mark hangs over
their ability to do so.

At Springfield Mall, an open-air heroin shooting gallery in Kings
Cross, I recently watched a dozen glazed-eyed addicts hunched over,
syringes in hand as they sought veins for their hit. Bloodstained
syringes that may harbour HIV and hepatitis microbes littered the
mall's fringes. When I asked if it was difficult to buy heroin in the
area, one addict laughed at my naivety.

It's the same in other cities and towns. In Melbourne, addicts haunt
inner-city Smith Street, close by the location of one of Victoria's
five planned injection rooms.

Myth 8: Overseas experience shows that having injecting rooms and
tolerant policies towards narcotics does not increase drug use.

Wrong again. The Uniting Kingdom had always allowed doctors to
prescribe heroin to those who could not cope without it, but in the
1960s there was an explosion of use. Even though most specialists
where subsequently prevented from prescribing heroin, the damage was
done. By the early 1990s, known addiction rates were still increasing
rapidly every year.

On the other hand, Sweden has taken the opposite route, achieving
astonishing success with a zero-tolerance policy on drugs. Swedish
drug legislation makes no discrimination between "soft" and "hard"
drugs and police come down hard on dealers and users who are found to
be dealing. In contrast to Australia, Sweden also rejects the policy
of "harm minimisation," which was adopted here at a premiers' summit in
1985. Under that policy the government accepts that drug use is a
reality and that money used for halting the spread of drugs is better
spent on improving addicts' health and welfare. The concept has
mushroomed to take in virtually all drug and alcohol treatment in
Australia, even in schools.

In its Drug Education Strategic Plan 1994-99, for instance, Victoria's
Department of Education, Employment and Training states: "Students
should acquire knowledge and skills to make informed decisions about
their drug use, and so minimise any harmful effects associated with
it."

The implementation of the harm-reduction policy has resulted in a
dramatic increase in the number of drug users here and also in Great
Britain where it is in force.

In Australia, it's meant that heroin use has spread through our cities
and even into hundreds of country towns. Amber Stewart, of Armidale,
in New South Wales, had her first heroin hit when she was 13. Her
mother, Gwen, blamed the government for providing Amber with the
financial means to live away from home. "She turned into a thief and a
liar, but that wasn't Amber, that was the heroin," says Gwen. In
March, Amber died from heroin at age 14.

In contrast, the Swedish government was spent some $195 million over
the past two decades stressing to its citizens through media campaigns
and school education programmes that even soft drugs like marijuana can
cause serious harm. As a result, Sweden has one of the lowest rates of
illicit drug usage in the world.

IF INJECTING ROOMS are doomed to failure, as many Australian experts
now suggest, how can we fight and win the war against heroin?

Australia should be following the example of Sweden, says Craig
Thompson, a senior New South Wales magistrate who has dealt with
thousands of drug addicts in his court. "With their nontolerant
approach to drug use, sound educational programmes for children and
parents, and innovative rehabilitation schemes, Sweden has had
remarkable success in reducing demand for illegal drugs," he says.

The prime minister has committed $500 million to his government's Tough
on Drugs strategy. But our five dud Collins Class submarines cost more
than $5 billion and now need modifications to the tune of $266 million.
As the Reverend Moyes points out: "The cost of just one of the
submarines would finance a highly effective Swedish-style strategy
against heroin addiction and save a large number of lives."

Experts like Watters and Thompson insist that federal and state
enforcement agencies must receive enough funding to provide more
sophisticated means of detecting drugs entering Australia. This must
be coupled with strong policing of street sellers. Harm-minimisation
policies must be replaced with harm prevention policies aimed at
reducing supply and demand. Most importantly, we must provide
increased funding to enlarge rehabilitation programmes that prove they
can wean addicts off drugs.

We should also be concerned about what injecting rooms will do to
Australia's image. This is the Olympics year and thousands of overseas
journalists will soon descend on us, many eager to report back on life
in Australia.

It won't be an easy fight to rid the country of heroin, but it's a
fight Australia must tackle with all the resources it can muster. Most
urgently we must stop injecting rooms from becoming established in our
cities and towns. As Moffitt says: "There's a grim consequential
reality about injecting rooms that must be recognised. There's a very
real risk, indeed a strong likelihood, that heroin and the number of
users and addicts will increase substantially as a result of their
operation."