The Demise of a Legal Injecting Room

 

Collis Parrett, Drugs Policy Analyst, AFA ACT

Or the past several years there has been a sustained push from drug law reform organisations to open a supervised injecting place (SIP) in Canberra. The arguments for SIPs include the claim that they would save lives, and so on. This push for SIPs, and heroin trials must be seen against the background of the 18 year old failed national drug strategy of harm minimisation (HM) which places a high priority on drug maintenance as a form of treatment eg the methadone maintenance program, and significantly lower priority on achieving abstinence, or opiate-free lives. Unfortunately, this policy immatures with age.

Cardinal public health principles governing drug epidemics demand that in each of the prevention areas the fundamental aim must be to reduce the number of drug users and potential users. You may conclude this is only commonsense - but if a country does not have a drug policy which heavily prioritises the aim of abstinence from illegal drugs, we must have, in my opinion, ever increasing numbers of drug uses. Also, a number who support HM and who wanted an SIP also hold an ideological position which actively supports removal of criminal sanctions for the personal use of illegal drugs. This stand cannot reasonably be seen as compatible with the top prioritisation of drug use prevention and its true corollary - rapidly increasing numbers of drug free lives. One can only surmise to what extent this ideology may reside in and influence HM and its treatments/programs - and I make no judgement on this.

In the later stage of my opposition to an SIP, I was greatly assisted by a very incisive analysis by Dr Stuart Reece of Queensland and Mr Gary Christian of NSW of the evaluation of the Kings Cross Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) trial outcomes. The analysis is entitled Analysis of Kings Cross Injecting Room Report (September 2003).

The main conclusions of the analysis were:

The MSIC was in breach of International Conventions against illicit drug use, a stand supported by the International Narcotic Control Board.

· Statistically the MSIC could not claim to have saved one life, let alone the six they did claim.

· Overdoses in the Kings Cross area were 36 times less than in the MSIC.

· No improvement in almost every success/failure indicator.

The lack of improvement includes:

No evidence the injecting room reduced the number of overdose deaths in the area.

· No improvement in ambulance overdose attendances in the area.

· No improvement in overdose presentations at hospital emergency wards.

· Increased notifications of newly-diagnosed Hep C in the Darlinghurst/Surry Hills area (worse by11%   per year)

· Increased drug trafficking on nearby Kings Cross Station.

Greatly increased drug trafficking in the vicinity of the MSIC.

I presented the analysis to the Chief Minister and the Minister for Health in the last quarter of 2003 when a Government decision was almost due. A very short time later (just before Christmas 2003), the Government announced that an SIP would not proceed as it had lost its priority in the funding mix.

I have since been told that the SIP issue will be monitored, and may be revisited in the future if circumstances warrant it. In view of all the above negatives, it is hard to see how it can in any way conceivably 'warrant' a revisit.