Horror inside Melbourne commission towers where residents live next door to heroin ground zero
This is Melbourne’s junkie ground zero. Residents in these towers live a daily hell where opening their front door comes with great risk.
News
Don't miss out on the headlines from News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
A child’s pink bike, fitted with training wheels, rests against the wall in the corridor next to piles of rubbish, used syringes and a Coles shopping trolley.
The smell is putrid — a mix of urine and cigarette smoke.
A procession of drug users make their way past security on the ground floor and into the lifts. They will be met, according to residents I spoke with, by a dealer in her 80s selling the “cheapest and purest quality drugs”.
Outside, childrens’ playgrounds are deserted with the exception of one or two teens on swings. Drug deals are happening in the open, 30 minutes after primary school finished 50 metres down the road.
This is life at arguably Melbourne’s worst-located commission housing towers and it is impossible to ignore the heartbreaking and jarring juxtaposition — children and drug addicts.
“No, I don’t feel safe,” says 51-year-old long-time resident Jackie as we visit her home.
She has spent 20 years living in the towers at Elizabeth Street, Richmond with her three children and has seen it all, before and after Melbourne’s only injecting room moved in next door.
She has called triple-0 countless times, seen drug users shooting up outside her door and consoled her daughter when a teacher told her “all the kids from the highrise towers in Richmond turn into druggies”.
“I found one dead body before the injecting room arrived,” she said. “But there have been more after. I feel so unsafe even during the day going for a walk. I get constant verbal abuse and sexual harrassment.”
On the street outside the towers, a recovering drug addict is walking a staffy — the brindle ball of muscle pulling hard against its harness.
He says he took the dog after another user tried to trade it for a hit of heroin.
“He’s a good dog,” he says.
Other users are shouting obscenities, hunched over on communal chairs and wandering shirtless from the injecting room into the local milk bar.
Ground zero for Melbourne’s heroin epidemic is one of the most controversial sites in the city.
It has a short but colourful history dating back to 2019 when the Andrews Labor Government opened the medically-supervised injecting room at 23 Lennox Street on a trial basis. It was given permanent status in March, 2023.
Since then, there have been numerous incidents including drug users passing out in the street clutching syringes, a dead body opposite the primary school, a man entering the school grounds with a knife and a man exposing himself outside the school fence.
Dan, in his 30s, has lived at the highrise towers at 108 Elizabeth Street since he was 12. He says it has never been this bad.
His hallway routinely floods because drug users access the fire hydrant outside his flat. They get syringes from the injecting room and use the water to dilute their drugs for injecting.
His thoughts on the injecting room’s location next to a primary school are simple: “It’s the worst idea ever.”
He says the area is hard to make it out of alive. A number of his friends have died from overdosing on drugs.
“A lot of my friends grew up in the towers and let’s just say they didn’t end up too well.
“One of them just had his first kid. I knew him since he was 15 or 16. He was 22 years old and he f***ing died, mate.”
Melbourne is Australia’s heroin capital. Users here account for almost half of the nation’s heroin use, according to the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s most recent wastewater testing statistics. And it’s only getting worse.
Heroin users in Victoria used an estimated 456kg of the drug in 2023. NSW came in second with 366kg, well ahead of Queensland in third at 82kg.
Drug users have for decades come to parts of Richmond to score. They were there before the injecting room arrived, but those who live nearby say they have come in droves since it opened.
Christine Maynard, a long-time Richmond resident, says she worries most about the children growing up in the commission flats.
“There are enormous issues that come with having a drug den on their doorstep,” she said.
“They are so vulnerable. It’s outrageous that you see kids walking around the injecting room. What are we actually doing to these kids?
“I just spoke to two kids from a local school who live in the flats and it’s just normal to see drug users in and out of the buildings. It should never be normal.”
She has photographed the horror scenes on her doorstep for years. She was there when police cordoned off an area across the road from the injecting room after a user overdosed and died on the footpath.
On one occasion she found and photographed a blood-filled syringe under two blocks of chocolate on a barbeque in a communal area outside the flats.
“Kids would’ve gone to pick up the chocolate blocks and there was an uncapped syringe full of blood,” she said
Peter has lived at the towers for 30 years and raised his family there. His daughter is grown up now, carrying a baby girl in her arms outside 110 Elizabeth Street.
“I think the main issue is just the injecting room in recent years,” his daughter says.
“They’re not moving it so it is what it is.”
She says she is rarely scared for her safety.
“Occasionally when they start yelling or screaming and stuff, it’s not great.
“Richmond has always been a drug area. For me, personally, I guess I hope that it changes for her sake,” she says, nodding towards her daughter.
One of the biggest changes she has seen is the number of drug users “living in the flats”.
“That never used to be the case,” she said. “They used to just be more outside, but now they’re all in the buildings.”
News.com.au previously obtained a 32-page document that revealed traumatic “experiences of Richmond West Primary School families”.
In it, parents talked about the school having “two lockdowns in one week”, children “needing professional counselling” and kids under 10 picking up needles.
“He bent down and in the flash of an eye he’d picked up a syringe,” one parent wrote. “I got a fright and yelled at him to drop it — he was very distressed.”
North Richmond Community Health, which manages the safe injecting room, says that between 2018 and 2023 there were almost 8000 overdoses inside the facility and all were safely managed.
Most overdoses were treated with oxygen but some required the use of an opioid that reverses the effects of heroin.
In April, it was announced that North Richmond Health Partners would take over the operation of the injecting room.
The organisation is made up of four health services: North Richmond Community Health, St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, Access Health and Community and Your Community Health.
At the towers, Jackie says she hopes the situation improves. But she has been living with it for two decades and knows not to hold her breath.
As for her daughter, the young girl who was told “all the kids from the highrise towers in Richmond turn into druggies”.
She spends her days saving lives in the pediatric ICU at the Royal Children’s Hospital.
rohan.smith1@news.com.au | X: @ro_smith
Originally published as Horror inside Melbourne commission towers where residents live next door to heroin ground zero
‘Poor state’: How Victoria fared in federal budget
There was no new cash for the Allan government’s $34.5bn Suburban Rail Loop East in Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Budget — which now looms as a major federal election issue — but money for roads and the airport rail link.
Read more
Tiny budget detail will have huge impact on home prices
The Albanese government committed less than $900m in new funds to support Australia’s housing crisis, but one key factor treasurer Jim Chalmers flagged may have the largest impact on home buyers.
Read more