'SNORT, SMOKE, BUT DON'T INJECT'

A leading drugs authority has encouraged heroin users to either snort or
smoke the drug, rather than inject it, to help stop the spread of hepatitis
C and HIV.

Dr Alex Wodak, the director of the Alcohol and Drugs Service at Sydney's St
Vincent's Hospital, yesterday told a Melbourne conference the incurable
strain of hepatitis was now the biggest health threat to injecting drug users.

Dr Wodak said the number of injecting drug users with hepatitis C was a
bigger problem for Australia than HIV, costing the health budget more than
$150 million a year.

He told the Seventh Annual Symposium on Hepatitis B and C that of the
11,000 people who became infected with hepatitis C in Australia in 1997 91
per cent injected drugs.

Dr Wodak said the number of Australians who injected drugs doubled every 10
years and heroin production was doubling or tripling every decade worldwide.

He criticised as inadequate the systems for detecting heroin smuggled into
Australia.

Only 2 per cent of people entering the country each year were searched for
drugs, he said, and only 3500 of the two million containers coming into
Australia each year were searched.

Dr Wodak said the health care system would be swamped unless different
approaches to drug abuse were adopted.

He said injecting rooms should undergo trials and said it was realistic to
encourage users to snort or smoke drugs rather than inject. At $20 to $30 a
cap, heroin was cheaper than it had ever been, he said.

Dr Wodak said that since the Netherlands had introduced injecting rooms the
number of injecting heroin users had halved and the rate of new users had
declined.

He said Australia had made positive progress in its efforts to control
drugs and disease and should be commended for its needle exchange programs.

If clean needles were not readily available in Australia, HIV "would have
spread like wildfire and we'd have an even bigger problem". He said
Australia was handing out more needles than the United States.

The symposium was told by Professor Andrew Lloyd of the University of New
South Wales that between 40 and 50 per cent of male prisoners and 70 to 80
per cent of female prisoners had hepatitis C.

Drugs were readily available to prisoners but needles were not and sharing
was common, he said.