ODYSSEY DAMNS BRACKS DRUG FUNDING

HEROIN addicts died while the Victorian Government spouted empty rhetoric
and ignored a critical shortage of treatment services, the state's peak
rehabilitation agency said today.In a damning assessment of the Bracks
government's drugs agenda, Odyssey House accused it of "fiddling around the
edges" while ignoring burgeoning waiting lists for drug treatment.

As the debate over supervised heroin injecting facilities raged, waiting
lists for rehabilitation beds were three weeks and more.

Odyssey's chief executive officer David Crosbie was so enraged by the death
of another client waiting for a bed on the weekend he sent a scathing letter
to all Victorian MPs this week.

"We at Odyssey House are tired of rejecting people who really need our
help," he wrote.

"This weekend one of the clients who had been waiting several weeks for a
place in treatment died of an overdose. Another day, another preventable
death."

The Odyssey House residential program is funded to provide 65 residential
treatment beds for addicts but has averaged 80 residents over the past
month.

Mr Crosbie said the only way they could fit more people in would be to
ignore health and safety regulations and have people sleeping in corridors.

In addition, Odyssey has more than 20 people awaiting treatment in their
unfunded preparation program and receives about 80 phone calls a day from
people seeking help.

"Every day we fail to meet the very real needs of many desperate people," he
wrote.

Mr Crosbie said the state Government had talked about increasing funding for
rehabilitation services for more than a year but had done nothing about it.

The only assistance was a "marginal CPI adjustment" which lifted the per
bed-day funding from $77 a bed to $84 - the first increase in three years.

While everyone in the drugs debate agreed more rehabilitation and treatment
was needed, the issue of more funds was bogged down in bureaucracy.

"We need it now but the Government just seems to ignore this," Mr Crosbie
said.

"They are focusing too much on the political rhetoric and the pointscoring.
Meanwhile there are literally hundreds of people waiting to get into detox."

Mr Crosbie said he did not object to the Government's proposed trials of
supervised injecting facilities, due to be debated in state parliament next
month.

But addicts needed to be assisted the moment they sought help, usually in a
moment of crisis. These people could not wait three weeks and more to get
into a program, he said.

Odyssey needed another million dollars a year, he said.

Currently Victoria had less than 200 residential beds for addicts seeking
treatment, but at least double that number was needed, Mr Crosbie said.

He said agencies at the coal face of the drug problem had been shut out of
the review process being chaired by the government's drugs advisor,
Professor David Penington.