DRUG WAR'S FRONT LINE IS THE GROUNDS OF A KINGS CROSS CHURCH

A drug addict, giving his name as Scott Flower, pulled up his shirt sleeve
to show the needle tracks on his arm yesterday at St Canice's Parish
Church, Kings Cross, and declared himself in favour of supervised shooting
galleries.

A heroin user for the past 11 years, he had "shot up" in all sorts of
places, including places where he feared sitting down because of the risk
of needlestick injury. He had seen fellow users die.

Three days after the Vatican ruled against Catholic Church involvement in
supervised "shooting galleries" for drug addicts, his life was as it was
for hundreds of others in Kings Cross and elsewhere, feeding their
addiction regardless of official arrangements.

Father Stephen Sinn, parish priest at St Canice's, Roslyn Street, for five
years, said there would be 300 people turning up at the parish kitchen for
a midday meal. Of those, 80 per cent would be drug addicts.

"I believe there will be a shooting up facility eventually," he said. "But
it won't be the Sisters of Charity running it."

A Jesuit, and as such with a special affinity with Rome, he did not
question the Church's authority, represented in the edict brought down by
the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, that the Sisters of Charity
at St Vincent's Hospital should not be involved in supervising a shooting
gallery.

"My general point is that people will obey but they won't accept the
decision because they don't feel they have been listened to," he said.
"There is a group within the Church quick to make decisions. I think they
are fearful."

The issue is set to divide the Church, with rumblings apparent in the
Catholic Weekly even before last Thursday's edict, although the Archbishop
of Sydney, Cardinal Clancy, officiating at the annual Commissioning of
Graduate Catechists at St Mary's Cathedral yesterday, made no mention of it.

Father Sinn, 21 years a priest, most of that time ministering to the
downtrodden, said that before Mass yesterday morning he had to clean blood
off the parish church steps, blood left behind by an addict. He had cleared
away "at least half a dozen little heroin balloons".In August, the number
of people shooting up in the church grounds, its toilets and the general
area was so great that the parish had decided to close down its
five-days-a-week kitchen and put the word out that shooting up around the
church was not on.

"They were shooting up in the toilets because that is one of the few places
you can get water, and you need that to mix the drug," he said. "But there
were so many syringes being disposed of they were blocking the toilets."

The kitchen had opened after a month, and there had been some reduction in
the amount of drug abuse. But it had resumed, and he was calling emergency
services regularly.

In the kitchen, he had had to summon up all his pastoral skill to control
spaced out and violent people. Last year, one of them stabbed him in the
hand with a flick knife.

While he believed an injecting room was inevitable, addicts were meanwhile
spoiling the neighbourhood, driving away ordinary people, especially those
with children, and dying.