REBECCA, IT'S SUCH A WASTE

Sydney's Injecting Room Has Come Too Late For The Mother Of One Young
Heroin Addict. She Talks To Paola Totaro.

The letter arrived with no warning, less than three small pages of
tight, fresh grief: "My daughter Rebecca Margaret Anne Dunne died from
a heroin overdose on the night/morning of 9/10 July. She was 29 years,
10 months and 9 days old.

"Rebecca had been addicted to heroin for 12 years, addicted to
methadone for eight years and as a poly-drug user addicted to many
other substances from time to time. In the final analysis, the unequal
struggle was just too great.

"I really don't know what I am going to do now, as I was addicted to
her and her addiction; for the past 12 years I was addicted to keeping
her alive, through some of the worst but also some of the best times,
the funniest times and the saddest times. I miss her terribly."

Tonti Laird-Dunne, who wrote the letter, is one of the hundreds of
parents in NSW who have lost a child to heroin. Eloquent, dignified,
her voice still holds a hint of her Scottish origins. Despite her
recent loss - she had to identify her daughter in the morgue with a
policeman by her side less than a month ago - she speaks about Rebecca
with joy and humour, and is vigilant against sentimentality.

She insists her experience is no different from the terrible stories
of addiction played out every day in thousands of homes and streets
around the country. Statistics from the National Drug and Alcohol
Research Centre show 226 people in NSW died of a heroin overdose in
1996.

"It's so easy for a parent who has been on the long march to become
sentimental," says Laird-Dunne. "While my daughter was my child, there
were times when I could quite willingly have killed her myself to stop
the misery she was causing to herself and those around her.

"It's an old, old story, but every parent would recognise the
feelings, and for that reason I'm trying not to get too sentimental.
Rebecca was an amazing girl. Wilful, devastatingly funny, an amazingly
perceptive child.

"She was a pretty girl, not beautiful. She had a horribly infectious
laugh, was very verbal, very articulate. From a very young age, she
could crack a room up, first by the funny things that little kids say.
But then as she grew older, her deep sense of humanity and ability to
reach out to other people came out.

"She was able to draw shy people out of their corners. She was so
kind. First she brought home strays, then later she brought home
people less fortunate than her. I feel this may have been one of the
reasons she was drawn into the drug milieu."

Rebecca's leap into the maelstrom of heroin remains inexplicable to
her mother. Educated at one of Sydney's seaside Catholic schools, she
was surrounded with family love and support. In her teens, however,
she fell for a young man, the son of a convicted drug trafficker, who
introduced her to heroin and dealing. Her recruitment into his
distribution ring and her slide into addiction went hand in hand, and
by the time the relationship ended many years later, she had a raging
habit.

Rebecca battled for years, often with her mother by her side;
abstaining, relapsing, returning to the boyfriend, hiding, using,
running and relapsing again.

"While people have access to a continuous supply of heroin or drug of
choice they can continue to live their lives. But when that supply is
taken away, then I'm afraid the end is nigh," Laird-Dunne says. "When
Rebecca was away from home, I helped her financially. Perhaps I should
have been tougher, not given in to her, but I couldn't stand to see
her suffer. There were times when I would go looking for her and see
her on the streets of Kings Cross.

"But I just couldn't approach her or drag her away ... I feel so
strongly for parents who haven't got the wherewithal, the strength,
the drive. There are so many parents out there whose beautiful
children will succumb, become victims, because their parents don't
have the strength to go with them."

Laird-Dunne soaked up coverage of the NSW Drug Summit in May, hopeful
it would pave the way for a fresh approach to tackling the issues and
give hope to parents like her. She describes as "absolutely fantastic,
if years too late" the Government's reforms unveiled this week,
including $93 million in extra funding for new rehabilitation and
treatment programs, and approval for the nation's first medically
supervised injection room.

"It is too late now for Rebecca. But I am hopeful that they will power
ahead to help other parents not be in this situation. I will never,
ever get over it.

"She was like my right arm, like my right eye. She made me see life,
live life in a different way. She saw things like I did. Maybe that
symbiosis was not healthy, maybe I should have gone the tough-love
road. But I couldn't see my child suffer.

"I gave in to Rebecca so many times. She gave me 29 years, 10 months
and 9 days of knowing what real life was like. She would take bites
out of life and swallow them whole ... in ways other people are afraid
to do. [Her death] was just the end of her story."

Rebecca, unlike many other young addicts, was supported by family and
friends and battled her demons always with the knowledge of her
mother's unconditional love. And yet her end came when she was alone,
like so many heroin users before her.

It is this common thread in the stories of so many addicts - a lonely
death - that drives supporters of legal injecting rooms: from medical
experts like St Vincent's drug and alcohol head, Dr Alex Wodak, to
activist parents like Tony Trimingham and the Police Royal
Commissioner, Justice James Wood.

Yet the Drug Summit's most controversial decision, the legal injecting
room, is the recommendation that will probably touch the smallest
number of people. Estimates of 50,000 injections annually in the
injecting room translates into 137 users a day, many of them the same
local users. Compare this with the thousands throughout the State to
be affected by the cannabis cautioning system.

Bob Carr, the Premier, and John Della Bosca, the Special Minister of
State who will oversee the drug reforms, stress the most radical
measures are trials that can be abandoned if they do not work.

"That is what we have put in place. A series of trials which, in the
final analysis, allows you to select which ones work and which ones
don't. And then, and only then, do you start to implement more
permanent solutions," says Della Bosca.

Evidence of the effectiveness of injecting rooms, as tried in Europe,
is far from complete. Typically they provide medical staff, sterile
injecting equipment, and information about drugs and health care.
Swiss clinics offer counseling, showers for itinerants and the poor,
and tea and coffee.

All clinics prohibit the sale or buying of illicit drugs. Going by the
letters pages of many newspapers here, there is confusion about the
distinction between injecting rooms, where heroin is not provided, and
heroin trials, in which the drug is supplied to registered addicts.
The latter are not being tested in NSW.

Many injecting rooms require users to show identification, while
others restrict access to local residents. In Sydney, these details
are to be worked out by the Sisters of Charity Health Service at St
Vincent's Hospital and the NSW Department of Health.

The Lindesmith Centre, a respected North American drug-policy think
tank partly funded by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros,
found little data on the effects of injecting rooms after analysing 43
discussion papers from Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Australia.

But in Frankfurt, overdose data showed a decline in deaths from 147 in
1991 to 26 in 1997, after injecting rooms were established. Yet the
number of overdoses remained constant in other German cities, despite
the introduction of such clinics.

Frankfurt autopsy results showed HIV prevalence among drug users also
dropped, from 63-65 per cent in 1985 to 12-15 per cent in 1992. This
was attributed to a wide range of harm-reduction strategies, including
injecting rooms.

The Lindesmith Centre says they are "an effective component of
municipal drug strategies that include other low-threshold services,
such as needle-exchange and various forms of maintenance and treatment
for drug abuse.

"In certain locations and under certain circumstances, [injecting
rooms] may be an effective way to contact some of the most
marginalised drug users and reduce the harm of their drug use on
individual and community health, and public order."

That is what Sydney's injecting room trial is all about: reaching out
to those least able to help themselves, in an attempt to alleviate
what Rebecca's mother calls society's "huge web of sorrow".