A SYRINGE BANDIT HARDENS HEARTS

IN THE more or less public toilets behind the building where I work, I once
encountered a young guy of about 19. He'd just hit up in the cubicle when
my arrival at the urinal distracted him. He came out and stood behind me,
swaying and sobbing, a syringe clenched in his right hand. Terrified and
unzipped, I stood mesmerised by a wisp of blood I could see floating in the
barrel of the syringe.

He told me over and over that he was an addict, that he didn't know where
to go to get help, and that if someone did help him, he'd just end up
scamming or robbing them anyway. He was terrified, he said, of dying in the
gutter. The guy may have been a fairly typical heroin addict, but his
tragic, pitiful situation is not what the word junkie brings to mind. Not
now, anyway.

When a syringe-wielding bandit appeared a month ago reportedly robbing
people at needle-point, almost overnight he changed the tone of the city's
drug problem. It is immaterial whether or not the person was a drug addict
(police charged a Melbourne man over 21 separate attacks last week) the
bandit's blood-filled syringe somehow represented the intolerable end-point
of growing subliminal fears of drugs, unemployment and the social decay of
inner Melbourne.

Maybe that's why a hint of relieved laughter crept into television reports
of the bandit's run-in with a stroppy convenience store attendant last
week. I suspect that, like me, plenty of people enjoyed the fuzzy security
camera footage of a 7-Eleven attendant thrashing the alleged bandit with
almost biblical finesse, walloping the creep back to where he came from
with a nice hard seven-iron.

Mugging someone with the threat of an infectious disease seems like a
mediaeval abomination. It's not, of course. The syringe badit represents
the blatant worsening of a very modern set of problems.

Most Melburnians have witnessed the arrival of a thriving heroin trade on
our streets with a mixture of tolerance and bewilderment. Strangely, the
heroin boom coincided with the recent invention of Melbourne's CBD as a
place of high-rent leisure and relaxation, and a desperate kind of
etiquette has sprung up between junkies and everyone else. The installation
of blue fluorescent lights in toilets all over town might frustrate
junkies' attempts find an injectable vein, but most people ignore the
blatant deals they see, averting their eyes out of decorum or nervousness.
Live and let die, I guess.

The viciousness of the bandit's syringe ended this uneasy detente. For
inner-city workers and residents there is a fine line between the glamor of
living in the heart of a cosmopolitan city, and the squalor that comes with
it. The syringe bandit crossed that line. You could bump into him in any
street of the city, and if you had a few bob in your purse it didn't matter
who you were. He gripped the CBD in a miniature reign of terror.

Yet, since any meaningful response to the heroin epidemic depends on public
tolerance, we may come to regret the imagery of the bandit's brief rampage.
His appalling weapon of choice turned sympathy to loathing and our
gratified response to his videotaped undoing hinted at a new, harsher
attitude towards all addicts, not just the violent minority. If there was
ever a civilised, middle-Austalian weapon of last resort, it's surely the
golf club, useful for scraping a hooked tee-shot out of the rough or for
belting an aggressive intruder. Perhaps, like the syringe, the golf
club-as-weapon is a symbol: of a souring of our compassion and a widening
tear in the heart of our town.