WHILE POLITICIANS DEBATED, A JUNKY OVERDOSED, 1 KM AWAY

AS Craig Hinkley lay clinically dead from a heroin overdose, life went on
around him.

He sprawled on the pavement outside a hotel on the cusp of the Oxford St bar
strip, a few metres from respectability.

Passers-by turned their heads and hurried on as two friends began
mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It was his only chance until the ambulance
arrived.

At the Drug Summit a few blocks away, delegates heard an impassioned plea
from ambulance officer Jim Porter for safe injecting rooms.

"We're getting very sick of going to see young dead people. People who
overdose in public toilets and laneways are often not found ... they die,"
Mr Porter told them.

Craig Hinkley was young – only 26 – and had overdosed in a hotel toilet. He
was lucky this time. He could have died alone.

That day, delegates had visited Kings Cross, Cabramatta and drug rehab and
hospital detox units to learn about people like Craig. But the cocaine
addict and occasional heroin user was less than a kilometre away from their
city meeting at Parliament House, waiting for his next fix. Craig nearly
became a statistic – one of the 12 Australians who die each week with a
needle in their arm.

"All I remember is realising that I was going to drop (slang for an
overdose) and staggering out and telling my mate I needed help," he recalls.

"When I woke up, my mate and his girlfriend said they gave me mouth-to-mouth
until the ambulance came."

Craig thinks medically supervised shooting galleries are just common sense.

Addicts, said Craig "will shoot up anywhere, on the street, in your back
yard if they have to".

"But if they can go somewhere supervised, where there is less danger that
they will die alone in a gutter ... then they will."

He has used drugs heavily for the past 18 months and is a convicted heroin
dealer and thief who has spent seven years in jail.

He declined to say how he supports his current habit of up to 30 caps, or
$2000 worth, of cocaine a day.

Craig's roller-coaster life of drugs and crime mirrors a pattern outlined to
the summit by Justice James Wood. It began as a teenage shoplifter,
accelerated to dealing marijuana, then peaked with cocaine, heroin,
housebreaking and numerous jail terms.

His adopted mother, who still lives in his home town of Woy Woy on the
central coast, is "desperately concerned" for Craig and his 24-year-old
sister, a heroin addict who recently moved to Cabramatta so she could be
closer to Sydney's cheapest drugs.

"I know Mum worries a lot about us, but I have made the decisions that have
led me where I am, and I am responsible," he says.

Craig's birth parents died of heroin overdoses – his Chinese Australian
mother three months ago – but he calls himself "one of the lucky ones".

"Most of the people here have been raped, molested as they grew up," he
says, motioning to the dozen addicts sitting outside a city crisis centre.

God knows, I didn't think 10 years ago that I'd be here. But that's nothing
compared to what most of these people have suffered."