Steve Price: Richmond injecting room horror set to spread around the state

It’s been almost 30 years since Melbourne was in the middle of a heroin epidemic, but the Allan government’s recent pill testing changes shows we’ve learnt nothing from that horror story.

In the mid-nineties Melbourne was in the middle of a heroin epidemic.

In the Herald Sun the number of heroin overdoses each day sat next to the road toll. Heroin deaths outstripped fatal car accidents most days.

Riding with a paramedic road crew for a radio special on 3AW we responded to a call-out in North Melbourne. It was a single-fronted cottage, with the entry door open, and we walked into a scene from hell.

A woman was lying comatose on the kitchen floor and her partner – presumably the bloke who called triple-0 – was slumped on the couch. In heart breaking scenes there were two toddlers inside a playpen in nappies, crying.

The paramedics got to work and injected the unconscious woman with Narcan – also known as Naloxone – and she slowly came around and then exploded at her partner and the medical team trying to save her life.

Melbourne was gripped by a heroin epidemic in the 90s.

Despite being just minutes away from adding to that Herald Sun overdose tally, she was filthy that we had spoiled her heroin shot and demanded we leave.

She was just one of about half a dozen addicts we saved that day. Melbourne had been flooded by cheap heroin and compiling the radio special I watched from a hidden police vantage point as open drug dealing took over the streets of Footscray. This deadly trade was out of control and various state governments struggled to find a solution.

Tragically some 13 years after that traumatic afternoon in North Melbourne the Daniel Andrews government made the impossible-to-believe decision to open a drug injecting facility in Richmond, next to a primary school.

The injecting room trial lasted four years and in 2023 the mad fools in government made it a permanent so-called medical facility.

Legislation was passed to make this drug honey pot – despite the horror stories from Richmond residents, including dead bodies in the school playground – permanent.

So, 28 years on from that heroin horror story of daily overdose deaths and blatant street dealing what have we learned? Nothing!

The drug injecting facility in Richmond.

Just this week, the annual Coroner’s report to state parliament was released revealing that on average 12 Victorians a week are dying from drug overdoses — double the average that die on Australia’s roads each week.

To June 30 this year, 600 drug deaths were logged, a 17 per cent jump year on year.

That report revealed an analysis of the 2023 overdoses showed the emergence of a drug called Nitazene, a synthetic opioid designed to mimic drugs like MDMA and cocaine.

This stuff can be 100 times more potent than heroin and was thought to be behind the deaths of four people in a Broadmeadows house. Sixteen deaths have been linked to this drug since 2021.

In response, the Allan Labor government has started bragging about passing legislation legalising pill testing “in time for this summer’s music festivals”. In a media release a government spokesman claimed pill testing was about “saving lives and changing people’s behaviour.”

Really!

The new laws will see 10 pill testing sites at those drug taking festivals this summer and then next year — in mid 2025 — the Allan government will open Victoria’s first fixed pill testing site.

Sounds alarmingly like that Richmond heroin injecting room to me. And when you dig into the detail the government reveals this pill centre will be in inner Melbourne near nightclubs and public transport.

Pill testing will be introduced in time for this summer’s music festivals. Picture: Derek Moore

Do these people never learn? I’d watch out if I lived in Prahran or Windsor, two neighbourhoods off Chapel St that fit exactly that description and has ex-Green MP Sam Hibbins as the local member. Politically state Labor has gone down the pill testing road in a cynical attempt to steal inner city Green party voters back to Labor.

Put your money on one of the dozens of empty shopfronts – in what used to be a vibrant shopping strip – being that pill test venue, paid for by you, the taxpayer.

Granted this pill shop could alert some pill addicts that what they are about to take is a deadly cocktail of toxins that will kill them. It’s just as easy to make the argument that this taxpayer funded pill testing venue will encourage youngsters to buy illegal drugs and wander in for a test. How is that discouraging drug use?

Labor’s recently passed legislation makes the point the new laws will protect, legally, all parties involved in these drug parties including people staging the music festivals where the pills are taken, the pill testers themselves and their clients. This means according to the government nobody is breaking the law by pill testing.

This raises the question around what happens if a pill taker has one of a batch tested and it’s cleared and then another pill is laced and deadly. What this law means is the parents of a dead teenager can’t sue anyone for the loss of a child and music festival organisers will not be liable either.

If you think this is crazy, there is more.

The Allan government plans to provide expanded access to naloxone.

Once the pill testing shop opens the Allan government plans in 2025 to provide expanded access to naloxone, also known as Narcan, the overdose reversal drug I saw being used back in the nineties.

Incredibly this won’t be in medical centres or hospital emergency rooms but in 20 vending machines dotted around Melbourne and presumably in some regional centres.

Pray you don’t live near one of these drug reversal machines with queues of people waiting to stop the effects of an overdose of heroin or ice, maybe cocaine or MDMA.

These legislated drug use changes are typical of left-leaning governments, especially a hard left mob like the Jacinta Allan crowd. Unwilling to solve the drug problem with law-and-order methods including police dog searches and music festival pat-downs, they cave in and make it easier to take drugs more safely.

Simply put, the horror story that neighbours of the Richmond injecting room have had to put up with since 2019 is about to be spread around our city and regions.

Loathe

- ABC being forced to apologise for inserting gunshots into a report on Aussie troops in Afghanistan to make them look like war criminals.

- Allan government so desperate for money they are now upping the cost of Victorians dying with a probate death tax.

- Non-sensical banning of much of the rock climbing at the Arapiles site in the Grampians.

- Anti horse racing types trying to shut down our Melbourne Cup.

Love

- Donald Trump’s US election victory the greatest political comeback in history.

- Greens MP Sarah Hanson-Young making rare sense attacking the media regulator ACMA over its refusal to investigate the Kyle and Jackie O radio shows vulgarity.

- Ex-Queensland Premier Steven Miles finally confesses he didn’t take youth crime seriously during their election campaign.

- A $100 bet on the Melbourne Cup turning into a $3.2 million life changing win.