ROOM FOR BOTH INJECTING ROOM, REHAB CENTRE

THE DELAY in getting a youth drug-rehabilitation centre up and running in
the ACT is certainly disappointing, and one can easily understand the
frustrations of the ACT judiciary. What is equally disappointing, however,
is that Independent MLA Dave Rugendyke has used the latest controversy over
delays to the promised 10-bed centre as an opportunity to take another
gratuitous swipe at the planned heroin injecting room.

Canberra does not have to choose between a youth rehabilitation centre and
an injecting room. It can have and will have both.

Diverting money from the injecting room into rehabilitation won't make the
residential youth facility materialise any faster.

Nor would it be sensible to abandon the injecting facility and use the money
instead for counselling or education programs.

Each of these strategies rehabilitation, education and harm minimisation has
a place in a good, broadly based drug policy.

Each has different aims. None are interchangeable.

Mr Rugendyke might not like the philosophy of harm minimisation which
informs strategies such as injecting rooms and needle exchanges, but plenty
of other people, including medical and legal professional organisations, see
potential value in trialing approaches which don't fit neatly into the
law-enforcement model of tackling illicit drugs.

ACT Health Minister Michael Moore is not promoting an injecting room trial
at the expense of rehabilitation facilities for young users. He wants both,
has secured funding for both, and will get both.

Perhaps Mr Rugendyke is right, and there will still, even after the
allocated money has been spent, be a need for more education programs and
more counselling. He would spend his time more productively if he made
cogent cases for these things to be funded in their own right, rather than
demanding that already-allocated money be diverted into areas he feels to be
of greater importance in the war against drugs.

No-one has ever suggested that an injecting facility will diminish the
number of drug-related crimes, or cure addiction, or help people resist the
lure of illicit drugs in the first place.

How could it possibly do these things? It is not designed to do them.

Critics often compare harm minimisation schemes to a fleet of ambulances at
the bottom of a cliff, and argue that it makes more sense to have a secure
fence at the top of a cliff.

Wrong. It makes sense to have both.