DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINE OF THE UNWINNABLE WAR

Ballarat ambulance officer Phil Gribble remembers the old days when motor
accidents occupied so much of his time.

Today, they're way down in number, but people have found another reason to
require his services urgently.

Ballarat, he says, can have as many as 12 heroin overdoses a week in summer
and in school holidays.

Schoolchildren as young as 15, he says, are among those he has to revive
from overdoses. They sometimes used heroin at home when their parents were
away.

"Five or six years ago, for someone to have heroin overdose, the guys would
talk about it at work. Now, it doesn't even rate a mention. In the last
five years, it's just exponential growth," he says.

Users in Ballarat include the well-off as well as those bumping along the
bottom of society.

"If it keeps going the way it is, it will be a major problem for the
ambulance services just responding to it. Even now, we're going to have to
alter our rosters. Often it's late afternoons, and so they have to cater
for that. If it keeps going the way it is, it will certainly reach the
level of heart attacks."

Mr Gribble says the overdose victims generally recover quickly with large
doses of the drug Narcan. Most just walk away rather than go to hospital,
making him think the service needed to switch to a less capital-intensive
operation than a fully equipped ambulance.

As for the anecdotal accounts of cranky addicts abusing ambulance officers
for spoiling their fun, Gribble says that's only 5 per cent.

"I think they all know someone who's died, and they're pretty happy to be
pulled through. They're fine and away they go."

The Rural Ambulance spokesman, Paul Bird, says the Geelong, Ballarat,
Bendigo areas average three to four overdoses a week. It was only one a
week in the Gippsland area.

In Bendigo, he said, the MICA paramedics might do one a week, then the next
four overdoses in six hours. "There have been a couple of incidents where
we've had two narcotic overdoses from the same address two hours apart.
First mum, then dad, and the kids are still at home."

Another case, he said , involved resuscitating a woman in her 20s one
evening. The next morning she took another overdose and died.

"There was one 18 months ago who went unconscious on the train out of
Melbourne as it went through Kilmore. The train was stopped and we sent a
crew to revive that patient."