A TACTIC TO SAVE ADDICTS' LIVES

IT IS a measure of the seriousness of the drug problem facing this nation
that respectable, cautious people are applauding the announcement that a
safe-injecting room for heroin users is to be established in Canberra.

How has it come to this? How have community attitudes shifted so
dramatically that politicians with impeccable anti-drug credentials, church
leaders who have spent their careers counselling abstention, senior police
who have waded in the criminal sub-culture of drugs and doctors who have
witnessed the ravages of addiction could jointly countenance a plan to give
heroin addicts a place to shoot up, without fear of prosecution or moral
censure?

Quite simply it is because all believe that such a place presents society
with a chance to keep drug users alive, and to check the spread of
blood-borne disease, until the day those users are intellectually and
emotionally ready to try to kick their habits.

Safe-injecting rooms are not a panacea for Australia's heroin problem.
No-one has suggested they are.

They won't, for instance, reach the casual user who shoots up at a party
(and, being a casual user, is all the more sensitive to purity and all the
more prone to overdose). They won't stop drug use, or even necessarily
result in a single user entering rehabilitation who was not already of a
mind to do so.

A safe-injecting room is just one among many strategies to combat heroin.
Its opponents say that it potentially sends the ''wrong message'' about
heroin use, creating an atmosphere where substance abuse is seen as
acceptable.

That danger exists, but it could equally be said that the ''message'' that
has been sent until now is that society cares so little about addicts that
it would rather see them shoot up and die in a gutter than sustain them in
their addiction and keep them alive for another day.

The fact is that detoxification, by whatever method, is not always an option
for all addicts at all stages of their addiction. Nor is methadone. The
relapse rate among ''rehabilitated'' addicts is high, the prognosis rarely
glowing, the road to recovery frequently an arduous one. But, to state the
case bluntly, there is some hope for a live heroin user. There is no hope
for a dead user. None at all.

Such is the scourge of illicit drug use in this country that there would be
barely a workplace which has not been touched, at least tangentially, by
addiction. Few Australians would not know someone, or at least know of
someone, who has battled addiction and lost.

Perhaps this is why the apparent change in attitude has taken place. The
size of the problem has meant that addicts are no longer, for most
Australians, nameless, featureless individuals living in far-away big
cities. Increasingly, they are people we know: kids from good families,
adults with degrees and careers. Country and city people. Bosses and old
school friends. Relatives. Who among us would not want to see the addict we
personally know kept alive for another month or year?

The Canberra safe-injecting room, as with the similar room the NSW
Government recently agreed to set up in Kings Cross, Sydney, are trials, not
necessarily permanent fixtures. Their impact on overdose deaths,
transmission rates of blood-borne disease and so on will be monitored, to
see whether they are reducing the harm of illicit drug use or not. That is
the most anyone has ever claimed for a safe-injecting room trial, and the
most the community should expect.

But if these modest aims can be met and lives saved, one skirmish in the war
against drugs will have been won.