Safe injecting at needle exchanges floated for Geelong

Providing safe spaces for intravenous drug users at existing needle exchanges has been floated as an alternative to establishing a purpose-built injecting room in Geelong.

Craig Harvey. Picture: Alan Barber

Providing safe spaces for people to intravenously use drugs at existing needle exchanges has been floated as an alternative to establishing a purpose-built injecting room in Geelong.

Geelong researcher and harm reduction practitioner Craig Harvey said people perceived safe injecting rooms as purpose-built facilities with multiple booths, in locations where there were a lot of people using drugs.

“And then when you come to a regional town like this … the drugs market is far more spread out,” Mr Harvey said.

Mr Harvey, who works at Barwon Health, said there were “more unique ways of solving the problem.”

He appeared on a panel alongside local GPs and Judy Ryan, an activist who led the campaign for the North Richmond injecting centre.

Norlane’s Debbie Brady recently started a petition for a medically supervised injecting room in Geelong after her son died from an overdose.

Jye Vessey in his younger years with mum Debbie Brady. Picture: Supplied

Jye Vessey died from a heroin overdose in a Corio Community Health Centre rest room after visiting its needle exchange on April 28, his family says.

Mr Harvey said with a spread out, diverse drug market, there were people using drugs in many different parts of the community.

He put forward the idea that people could collect injecting equipment from existing smaller services, then have somewhere to safe inject there, which would mean not necessarily having to build “huge facilities”.

“What we currently do is we give people the tools to inject … and then we say ‘go and do that really risky behaviour somewhere else’,” he said.

Dr Tim Denton, Judy Ryan, Craig Harvey and Dr Mark Davies at the Geelong library.

“When we think about how we design services … I think that needs to be something that we factor in to how harm reduction services are built, we don’t always have to think about these larger purpose-built facilities.

“We need to think really, really carefully about how we build injecting facilities where we’re supplying the equipment for people to use.”

Ms Brady was in the audience at Geelong library on Thursday night and said she believed injecting rooms were needed, especially where needles were being given out.

“Maybe everywhere that there’s a needle exchange, there needs to be a safe injecting room,” she said.

She said people with drug addiction would use “as soon” as they had obtained what they needed to do so.

Ms Ryan said it seemed “crazy” that programs handed out clean syringes and then people had to leave the premises to use drugs in unsafe places.

“You don’t have to have great big facilities, they can be discreet facilities,” she said.

The state government has previously said it had no plans to open a medically supervised injecting room in Geelong.

Originally published as Safe injecting at needle exchanges floated for Geelong