OPEN TO IDEAS TO STEM THE TIDE

Dr David Penington has spent the best part of the past five years
hunting for answers to the heroin problem, for this State Government
and the last.

He has watched as the line on the graph that charts opiate-related
deaths stretched inexorably upwards. Last year it hit 359 deaths in
Victoria and it is still rising. The projected figure for 2005 is 496
deaths.

"If this were a public health issue with the rising death toll of the
kind I have shown you, to say that we would just go on with what we
are doing and hope that it gets better, there would be an absolute
outcry," Dr Penington said yesterday.

"Public health has only advanced because, when we haven't got an
answer, we've been willing to try new approaches. We do not have an
answer in our present arrangements. It is getting rapidly worse. We've
got to be willing to try new approaches, to test new approaches, to
see if they work and monitor them, and subsequently make changes as
necessary," he said.

There is a body of evidence that Dr Penington is accustomed to
pointing to when asked how supervised injecting rooms may provide part
of the answer, and why other methods of curbing the drug trade and
preventing deaths have not worked. He and his team of drug experts
have made numerous fact-finding trips to Europe to test this body of
evidence.

First, global production of illegal opium has increased by a third
since 1988, reaching 6000 US tonnes in 1999. And as the Asian opium
fields have grown, the price of heroin on the streets of Melbourne has
dropped from about $450 per gram in 1997 to about $300 per gram in
1999. The purity has increased - from about 55 per cent to almost 70
per cent.

Dr Penington said drug seizures had little or no impact on the price
and purity of heroin, and that Customs law enforcement, though
important, dealt with less that 10 per cent of the problem.

He said supervised injecting facilities in countries such as Germany,
the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria have succeeded in saving the
lives of users when they overdose, clearing the streets of public drug
use and crime, and directing users into rehabilitation and counselling
services.