Steve Price: Why we don’t need another injecting room
A drug user sits slumped in the gutter with a needle sticking out of their arm. It’s the picture that shows why Melbourne doesn’t need another injecting room, writes Steve Price. NEW WEEKLY COLUMN
Opinion
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Picture this.
It was 30 minutes after the school bell at the North Richmond Primary School had rung this Wednesday just gone.
Youngsters using scooters were being picked up by their parents many on foot as they live in the adjacent Housing Commission towers on Lennox Street.
Wednesday was Melbourne’s first real day out of COVID lockdown and the mood across the city was one of relief that an end was in sight.
Bars and cafes were setting up seats on footpaths and it seemed that for the first time in a long- time people were playing music and were happy.
Lennox Street Richmond is also the location of Melbourne’s first drug injecting facility. Its name doesn’t appear on Google maps alongside Hagen’s Wholesale Butchery or the All Nations Hotel, but it’s there.
Officially a health facility, it’s called a medically supervised injecting room and is attached to North Richmond Community Health, two buildings and a shared location. The drug room by the way is closed on Melbourne Cup Day next Tuesday — apparently no-one uses heroin on Cup Day.
It may as well have been closed when I visited on Wednesday to check its location before having a look at the proposed site for safe injecting room number two on Victoria Street in the CBD.
At Richmond there was no-one going in or out and there seemed to just be a couple of people on the door doing COVID checks. I guess you don’t want someone with COVID taking drugs in your facility.
After walking around the site I walked back down Lennox Street toward Victoria Street and turned left into Smith street, a small side street that turns into Shelley Street.
Not 50 metres from the injecting room I took the picture you see here.
Slumped in the gutter a needle sticking out of his or her arm — I couldn’t tell from a distance — was a drug user injecting in broad daylight.
Minutes earlier schoolchildren had scootered past and a local getting into a parked car had given the drug user some verbal advice suggesting using needles inside might be a better idea.
I cleaned up the language here, but the sentiment is echoed by nearly everyone who lives near our first injecting facility. Residents who had no choice about its location.
To put a heroin honey-pot — and that’s what it is — next to a primary school was lunacy and to establish it in the backstreets of suburban Richmond a huge mistake.
The picture I took just happened. I hadn’t made any solid plans to visit on that Wednesday afternoon at that precise time, it was just a spur of the moment thing.
I don’t think it’s too much of a presumption to draw that the user went to that location to buy drugs. The drug dealer who sold the contents of that needle would have known he had a market in Lennox Street Richmond because of the injecting room.
Demand and supply is pretty simple. If you give the users a reason to go to an area — the drug injecting room — the providers, the scumbag dealers, will follow.
Look closely at that picture and ask yourself how you would like to live in that little weatherboard cottage with the picket fence — not likely.
Isn’t it typical of the politicians and health bureaucrats who make these decisions that it’s never in their backyard.
Does anyone seriously believe current Melbourne Lord Mayor Sally Capp or any on her council would tick off on a shooting gallery in say South Yarra or even Little Collins Street next to the Town Hall — of course not.
Location is everything and absurdly council has got to now make a decision about a second drug room because the State Labor Government is determined to open one in the city.
As Melbourne struggles to recover from its COVID lockdown and desperately tries to get people back to the lanes, shopping strips and markets, we are actually actively having a debate about repeating the mistakes of Lennox Street.
On July 21 council voted against the preferred site at 53 Victoria Street in the city, metres from the Central Market.
Two Greens councillors typically abstained and the whole debate up until the close last weekend of local Government elections has gone suspiciously quiet.
Former Police Commissioner Ken Lay is doing a six- month study with the argument that Melbourne City is desperately in need of a such a facility because overdose deaths are second only to Yarra Council.
The numbers tell a different story. In four and half years between January 2015 and September 2019 there were 51 heroin related deaths in the CBD. The road toll by the way when I looked last Monday was 179, down from 219 this time last year.
Fifty-one overdose deaths are too many but that’s over a four and a half year period — less than one a month.
At the height of the heroin glut of 1997-98 in Melbourne when the price dropped, and the purity went up, we saw 268 overdose deaths in just one year, or over 22 a month.
It got so bad the Herald Sun ran the heroin death toll numbers next to the road toll every day.
The argument that Melbourne, the city, needs another safe injecting facility just doesn’t stack up.
Suggesting it be located at 53 Victoria Street next to a major tourist attraction is beyond stupid. On the same Wednesday I took the Smith Street picture I went and had a look — maybe I was missing something.
The market is shut on Wednesdays but that area would normally, pre-virus, be heaving with people, locals shopping, tourists visiting and stall-holders trying to run their businesses.
That location currently houses a health facility, some Government subsidised accommodation and some language services.
Directly across the street is an off-site University of Melbourne foreign student campus and the head office of the Environment Protection Authority.
Next door and just behind are two Budget hotels, an Ibis and a Mercure, and the CBD location for Melbourne City Lexus.
As late as last month on their own website Vic Health were still arguing this is the best place to attract heroin users and their dealers, presumably so they don’t have to travel all the way to Lennox Street in Richmond.
If Lord Mayor Capp and her councillors spend even five minutes re-evaluating their decision on this, they don’t deserve to be in council.
Look at my picture again and try for a moment to ignore your bleeding hearts and ask yourself if that’s the image Melbourne wants to project to visitors as we struggle out of lockdown.
Heroin addiction must be an awful thing to struggle with but giving users and more importantly dealers another retail destination to make using easier isn’t the answer.
Richmond has been a horrible mistake don’t let us repeat it.
Steve Price has joined the Saturday Herald Sun as a weekly columnist