ADDICTS DENIED TREATMENT, INQUIRY TOLD

Young people desperate to beat their heroin habits are being hampered
by a shortage of methadone programs across Victoria.

The Youth Substance Abuse Service - Australia's largest drug and
alcohol treatment service for young people - says addicts face a range
of hurdles when trying to get help.

These include a shortage of methadone programs, the cost of treatment,
a shortage of doctors willing to prescribe methadone, and pharmacists
willing to dispense it, because they feared their businesses would be
damaged.

Department of Human Services figures show that 1300 people aged 21 and
under are on community-based methadone programs. Eighteen of them are
aged only 15, while 40 were 16 and more than 260 are 17 and 18.

A submission to the State Government's inquiry into the heroin crisis
has revealed a desperate shortage of methadone services across Victoria.

A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Society, Mr Graham Blashki, a
chemist involved in training pharmacists who dispense methadone, said
the shortage of pharmacies dispensing methadone was "desperate",
particularly in country areas.

Mr Blashki estimated that in Box Hill - an area with about 100,000
people and only two pharmacies that administer methadone - about a
quarter of demand was being met.

The Youth Substance Abuse Service submission said: "The eastern
suburbs have few doctors or chemists prepared to administer methadone,
the outer western suburbs and the CBD area have chronic shortage
problems and right across rural Victoria there is an access crisis to
get on the methadone program.

"Though the program has grown at a rate of 20 per cent, it is nowhere
near the stage where it can absorb current demand."

The service's executive officer, Mr Paul McDonald, said most teenagers
caught up in heroin dependency were anxious to seek immediate help,
but were often unable to get it.

"Five years ago we would not have contemplated considering a 17 or
18-year-old for methadone treatment but we're finding there's a much
greater need for that now.

"They have to pick it up on a daily basis. That's why we need a
sprinkling of places (dispensing methadone) across the state."

Mr McDonald said it was intolerable that there was a waiting time of
about six weeks for young people wanting a place in the service's
residential withdrawal program.

In the past 18 months, six young people died of heroin overdoses while
they waited, it said.

The state's inquiry, chaired by Dr David Penington, is expected to
deliver its first report on heroin injecting rooms by the end of March.