A FAILURE OF POLITICAL COURAGE

But Defying The Law Is Not The Best Way To Advance The War Against Drugs.

WITH the best of intentions, clergy and social workers at the Wayside
Chapel in Sydney's Kings Cross have decided to open a ``shooting
gallery'', or safe injecting room, for heroin users.

They are taking a considerable legal risk: under NSW law, aiding and
abetting the self-administration of a drug carries a penalty of two
years jail. If death results from the self-administration of the drug,
such aiding and abetting can lead to a charge of manslaughter. While
it is clearly acting illegally, the chapel has invoked the ancient
right of sanctuary, arguing that because the room is on church ground
it is not subject to secular laws. The NSW Attorney-General, Mr Jeff
Shaw, has made it clear that Australian law does not recognise such
sanctuary.

But he has also said that police have a discretion as to whether to
charge the clergy, inviting the interpretation that a legal blind eye
will be turned to the injecting room.

Of course, a challenge to the law as a way of forcing the issue of
safe injecting houses on to the political agenda may be exactly what
the Wayside Chapel administrators intended.

They are confronted daily by the tragic consequences of heroin
addiction, and their frustration with the reluctance of politicians to
confront the issue is understandable. Last year a NSW joint select
committee investigating the issue of safe injecting rooms decided by
six to four against their introduction. Despite this, as the evidence
mounts that the punitive approach to illegal drug use is not working,
expert opinion is increasingly tending towards using injecting rooms
as part of a harm-minimisation approach.

Certainly, the evidence from countries such as Switzerland, where
legal injecting rooms have been established, is that deaths from
overdose have been significantly reduced. They also appear to have
curbed the incidence of HIV.

Permitting young people to inject themselves with heroin under
supervision is a concept few people could view with equanimity, but it
is preferable to them injecting themselves with unclean needles in
alleys.

Even so, the establishment of injecting rooms in defiance of the law
is not an ideal solution. While police do have a discretion to decline
to charge individual offenders - as shown in Victoria where a decision
not to charge first-time drug offenders has been in place since last
year - it forces police to make decisions that properly belong to
politicians. If political leaders had been prepared to take a more
enlightened approach to the drug problem, the youth workers and
ministers of religion who are operating the injecting room would not
now need to be taking part in acts of civil disobedience. At least,
their actions are likely to ensure the issue of safe injecting centres
is given serious consideration at the coming drug summit.