INJECTING ROOMS: AT LAST, THE DETAILS

ALTHOUGH there were elements of opportunism in the attitudes of the Liberal
and National Parties towards the Bracks Government's broad proposal for the
establishment of a small number of supervised heroin injecting facilities,
there was also a justifiable caution in their responses. Until the
government decided on the details of not just the on-the-ground specifics
of each injecting room but the more amorphous and difficult issues of
police and medical protocols, how could the opposition be expected to give
a meaningful response? Now it can.

With the issuing yesterday of the government's plans for injecting rooms,
the decision-making process on this most important of issues begins in
earnest. The government has taken the wise step - probably the only step it
could take given the Liberal majority in the upper house - of building a
double veto into its plans for the establishment of injecting rooms. It has
understood that the only way the trial facilities will stand a chance of
being set up is if the non-Labor parties can be part of the process at
every crucial step.

Within the next three months, parliament will be asked to endorse injecting
rooms in principle while also settling adjacent issues such as the police
presence in the vicinity of the facilities and questions of access to the
rooms. The government has acted astutely in getting the police on board,
securing agreed protocols with police command. This assuages one important
reservation held by The Age: the matter of how the police would be able to
uphold the law. At this early stage, it would seem that the agreement
between Health Minister John Thwaites and senior police would allow for a
strong police presence outside drug injecting rooms; strong enough to
ensure that dealers and loiterers would be kept away.

The second stage of the establishment process will require each injecting
room to have the full endorsement first of Mr Thwaites and then the
parliament. This has the potential to make the setting-up process unwieldy,
possibly allowing for scare campaigns in single neighborhoods to frighten
off nervous state MPs who might otherwise have supported the facilities,
but it is a necessary safeguard. The injecting room experiment will be
worthwhile only if it has broad support at the local council level and from
the parliament. Significantly, the government has admitted these procedures
were not its first choice and some of the safeguards were installed in
response to the Liberal and National Parties' misgivings about the nebulous
nature of Labor's initial proposals. The government's plan contains enough
checks and offers a sufficient degree of inclusiveness. It deserves to be
given a chance.