TRIP TO HELP LIBS RULE ON HEROIN ROOMS

A fact-finding mission to the US and Europe next week would help the State
Opposition decide whether to support supervised heroin injecting rooms,
shadow health minister Robert Doyle said yesterday.

Mr Doyle will be part of a delegation that will include representatives
from both major political parties that will visit the US, Germany,
Switzerland and Sweden to examine their responses to the illicit drug
problem. He will report back to his party after the trip.

The opposition will be asked to vote on the Injecting Facility Bill when
parliament resumes next month.

Mr Doyle said he would approach the trip with "an open mind characterised
by scepticism" about the effectiveness of injecting rooms. He also said he
had insisted on visiting Sweden, where governments had experimented with a
progressive approach to the drug problem but then returned to a more
conservative one.

The delegation will be led by the chief executive of VicHealth, Rob Moodie,
and will also include Bruce Mildenhall, the Labor MP for Footscray and
parliamentary secretary to Premier Steve Bracks.

The City of Maribyrnong is among five municipalities proposed for a trial
of supervised injecting rooms, but the plan has encountered fierce
opposition from Footscray traders and residents, despite the high rate of
heroin overdoses in the area.

The party will meet the architect of drug reform in Switzerland, Bertino
Somaini, and Swiss Health Minister Thomas Zeltner. There are heroin
injecting rooms in the Swiss cities of Bern, Zurich and Basel, and the Drug
Policy Expert Committee cites figures that suggest heroin-related deaths in
Switzerland have halved between 1992 and 1998.

Mr Doyle, who earlier this year examined drug policies in the US and the
Netherlands, said he wanted to find out how the effectiveness of various
harm minimisation strategies were measured, whether they saved lives, and
whether supervised injecting rooms had broken the nexus between illicit
drug use and crime, as well as primary health care and planning criteria
for the centres.

At present he was more inclined to support a medically supervised heroin
trial than injecting rooms because he believed it was more likely to
relieve the crime associated with drug use.

Dr Moodie said both parties needed to be represented in the delegation to
ease the political divisions on the issue.