VICIOUSNESS CONTRIBUTES NOTHING

Safe Injecting Rooms Save Young Lives

The Uniting Church is being condemned for providing shooting galleries
in Sydney and Melbourne. Church and health workers devoted to stopping
an average of three Australian deaths daily from drug overdose are
vilified publicly by vigilantes intolerant of the victims and ignorant
of the remedies.

There is a viciousness to this talk of shooting galleries which should
disappear from the drugs debate. This is the propaganda language of
the war on drugs, zero tolerance, in the mouths of those who fear harm
minimisation.

The same voices echo John Howard's vehement opposition to "sending the
wrong message", and support US-style policies despite Washington's
opposition even to needle exchanges. Yet what a deceptive and
manipulative message it is to say that a legalised, medically
supervised injection facility violates life and law. Surely that's a
completely wrong message to send about a trial designed to offer
addicts a chance to be alive for another tomorrow, to underline the
dangers of injecting alone and uncleanly, and to provide objective
evidence for health administrators.

There is nothing misleading or enticing about this image. The
injection trial in Sydney's Kings Cross, and those for Melbourne and
Canberra, face enough tribulations without having to contend with a
callous smear campaign. No one wants to shoot a messenger but these
voices should be shamed into silence.

Members of the Kings Cross chamber of commerce oppose the trial
injection room because, they say, it will spoil Australia's tourist
gateway. Their legal posturing was given credence last week by the
ABC's 7.30 Report. But walk l 1/2 blocks from the proposed injecting
room along the east side of Darlinghurst Road and you'll pass seven
strip joints or porn shops, two gambling rooms, a games arcade and
many bars. This is the chamber's avenue of honour to the adjacent El
Alamein memorial fountain.

It is also misleading to claim that an injection trial in Australia
will place us in breach of UN commitments. The Government should live
up to the letter and spirit of existing political and social
commitments (for example, on mandatory sentencing) instead of
volunteering for phantom obligations conjured up by the ill-advised
International Narcotics Control Board.

As a former Australian representative on the UN Commission for
Narcotic Drugs, located, like the INCB, in Vienna. I have no doubt
that the INCB is out of its depth and out of order. Shamefully, the
INCB has adopted the low language of the shooting gallery and
challenged Australia's right to produce opium poppies for morphine in
Tasmania -- as sought by Australia's representatives, and sanctioned,
in the UN Commission. No INCB view is automatically valid, nor can it
veto our actions, or afford the Prime Minister refuge from reality and
responsibility.

The 18-month Sydney trial will begin midyear. Its duration and
possible extension will depend on when and how it is evaluated,
professionally and politically. There will be many attempts to measure
(and muddy) the results. The clearest early outcome could be the
beneficial impact on ambulance workers and services.

Sydney ambulance officers may treat 10 overdoses in a row. Three years
ago in NSW alone they were responding to nearly 60 overdoses a day.
The dangers they face, and the desirability of supervised injecting
facilities, are movingly documented in the short book "You Must See
Some Terrible Things", by former ambulance officer Patrick Kennedy,
just published by Kangaroo Press.

The humanitarians in the Coalition Government and the Kings Cross
chamber of commerce might try responding to 000 overdose calls in
Kennedy's "dark and dangerous back streets".