OPENING AN INJECTING ROOM THE RIGHT THING TO DO

A doctor who treats drug users says they have needed a better deal, writes
RAYMOND SEIDLER.

OVER the past three weeks, strangers have brought into my surgery waiting
room a number of heroin-overdosed people unknown to me. After 20 years
working in drug and alcohol medicine in the Cross, I have never seen this
frequency of overdose victims.

These are people who shoot up in streets and laneways in the area around
Springfield Mall and are dragged into my surgery by well-meaning bystanders
or associates. Previously they have used injection rooms run by the sex
industry. These are now closed by police action.

Most of the patients have stopped breathing and are blue and lifeless.

In the crucial three minutes for resuscitation to take place many have
missed out and will suffer brain damage as a result of these episodes.

I inject Narcan - an antidote - and call for an ambulance. Alas, some
ambulance crews do not have Narcan supplies on board and must call for
back-up. So two fully operational ambulances are tied up, often for 20
minutes, with their crews administering oxygen and transporting young men
and women to St Vincent's or Sydney Hospital. The cost of this process
repeated up to 20 times a day around Kings Cross is astronomical to the
community at large and to the morale of paramedics, who burn out regularly.

Many of these patients will refuse transport to hospital and will be found
unconscious half an hour later, having taken the rest of their heroin and
dropping again.

Occasionally the revived patient will become belligerent once on his feet
and attempt to assault paramedics for having blown away a $70 hit with one
Narcan injection.

So, after 20 years of waiting for some enlightenment from authorities, I
joined Dr Alex Wodak and the Rev Ray Richmond at the Wayside Chapel for
meetings which led to the users' room opening last week.

At first I was worried about standing up and being counted. The potential
for legal action concerned me. Slowly but surely the groundswell of
community support galvanised my will to continue. If requested I will
attend overdoses at the users' room, although I believe they are unlikely
considering the rules of conduct rigorously applied.

This is the right thing to do. It sends out a message of hope to a
marginalised and damaged group in society.

I am a doctor who treats drug users, and they need a better deal. In 1985 I
began prescribing methadone to heroin users and I have seen many useful and
talented people reclaimed by their families and society. It was Dr Wodak
who suggested then that the coming AIDS epidemic would decimate our
drug-using population if we did not establish a needle exchange. We did,
and as a result we have the lowest rate of HIV in drug users in the world.

The new approach last week is perhaps the beginning of a change in the way
we look at addiction in Australia. Were the Rev Ted Noffs alive today he
would be happy in the knowledge that the church he founded was attempting
to give hope where none existed to the downtrodden and hopeless in Kings
Cross.