ANOTHER TRADER GIVES UP

The toll on business from Melbourne's heroin crisis has risen to three
as yet another retailer prepares to leave the Russell and Bourke
Streets precinct.

Last week The Age revealed that two prominent Melbourne retailers were
leaving the area because of a worsening drug trade that is keeping
their customers away.

Comics R Us in Russell Street will join Darrell Lea and pop culture
store Minotaur in Bourke Street in relocating its store as retailers'
frustration with police and council grows.

"I have a huge amount of respect for police, who are trying to deal
with this problem, but it seems to always be a Band-Aid approach when
a major sporting event is in town," said Comics R Us owner Matthew
Guy.

Mr Guy said users would fall asleep on their feet inside his store,
that the store's doorway was used by dealers selling drugs and the car
park at the rear of the building was covered in rubbish and syringes.

"In front of the store is a bus zone and you see them pull up, one of
them jumps out, goes across the road to score, comes back, they shoot
up and drive away. It's drive-through, takeaway smack," he said.

Mr Guy said the response from the Melbourne City Council was pathetic
in the face of such an obvious problem. Mr Guy said that the failure
of landlords to recognise the effect on business by reducing rents was
a major factor in relocating his store.

"As a small private operator, if we are going to pay such obscene
rents, we may as well do it somewhere that isn't such a toilet," he
said.

A biannual visitor to the United States, Mr Guy said the centre of
Melbourne was worse than anything he had seen in Los Angeles or New
York.

"My mother was visiting from Adelaide and, between our store and
Village cinema, I was asked eight times if I was `chasin' (asked to
buy drugs)." In the three years Comics R US has been trading in
Russell Street, he estimates the drug trade has tripled in the city.