Seven years after North Richmond drug injecting room opened, it remains as divisive as ever
A woman shoots heroin into a vein in her neck as schoolchildren look on. It’s just routine for those living in hellish conditions at Australia’s worst address.
A woman is picking up her son from West Richmond Primary School in leafy inner-city Melbourne.
But her son’s school is not like everyone else’s.
On this day, the reality hits home at the school next door to the most controversial building in Victoria — if not the whole country.
As children, some as young as five — leave the school grounds, a woman is injecting a substance into the vein in her neck.
She is using a mirror to help with accuracy as parents watch on in horror.
“Unfortunately, when they get to the neck, it means that they‘ve lost all other vein access so that was probably one of the scariest events,” Letitia, who did not wish to reveal her last name, told news.com.au.
That incident, in August of 2019, set a benchmark for what would become a new normal one year after the supervised injecting room opened right next door to the school.
The site has since then drawn the ire of school families, locals and Richmond business owners fed up with the increase in violence and anti-social behaviour after the Labor Government in Victoria agreed to place it next to the existing primary school.
Yarra City Council, which is forced to do much of the clean-up work including collecting discarded syringes, initially supported the plan.
But this month, in a spectacular backflip, the council has demanded it be moved.
Mayor Stephen Jolly took to social media to explain the 180.
“It saves heaps of lives in Richmond,” he began, noting, correctly, that thousands of overdoses have been safely managed at the facility since it opened seven years ago.
But he said the impact on the rest of the community was far too great.
“There has to be more support services for people who are using that so it’s not just a dumping ground for the poor unfortunate people who are addicted to the needle,” he said.
“Because it’s the only one in Melbourne, and because there’s not enough support services, it’s led to a huge number of social issues. Car theft is 99 per cent higher in Richmond compared to the Victorian average.
“Violent crime is 35 per cent higher in Richmond compared to the Victorian average. That means that when people in Melbourne look at the supervised injecting facility in North Richmond, they go, ‘We don’t want it in our area because look at what it’s done to North Richmond’.”
What it’s done to North Richmond has been well documented.
In 2021, two years after it opened following a recommendation from the Victorian Coroner, concerned parents held a crisis meeting.
Neil Mallet, a father of two boys from the school, said a man entered the school grounds with a knife, prompting the school to lock its students in their classrooms.
It was revealed at the same meeting that the school had been forced to lock down three times in one week.
Claire, a resident of 20 years, said a man’s body was discovered outside the school days later and parents were advised to use a separate entrance at drop-off.
A three-page document obtained by news.com.au offered up a summary of parents’ concerns and examples of the traumatic incidents they were regularly exposed to.
The document, labelled a “snapshot of experiences from Richmond West Primary School families”, includes the following notes from parents:
- “After two lockdowns in one week, involving needing to get underneath a desk and hide, my daughter is traumatised. She needs professional counselling. She is terrified to come to school. My older children walk her to school; she grips their hands so tightly on the walk it hurts them.”
- “(A drug user) bent down and in the flash of an eye he’d picked up a syringe. I got a fright and yelled at him to drop it – he was very distressed. When I looked at the spot he picked the needle up from, there were two other needles – without caps – poking out of the dirt.”
- A third parent who lives “around the corner” from the injecting room recalled the terrifying moment her family were locked outside of their house due to a “drug-affected man” passing out on their doorstep: “My kids were terrified and we couldn’t get into our house,” the parent said.
In 2024, another overdose death took place right outside the school gates, on the footpath outside a home.
The confronting scene saw police tape off the street as students walked past craning their necks to get a look.
Under a tarpaulin was a 53-year-old who had overdosed less than 50m from the supervised injecting facility.
Local Christine Maynard told news.com.au the scene is all too familiar.
“It is not the first time and it will not be the last. Schoolchildren should never be subjected to what they see here.”
In May, footage emerged of schoolchildren walking past a man overdosing less than 50m from the school entrance.
A young boy filmed the scene and later showed his father the video. The boy’s dad said he had lived nearby for decades and seen it all but this incident was particularly difficult.
“It was heart dropping when I heard what that kid said in my lounge room,” he told news.com.au.
Another local who shared pictures and videos said the man was creating a scene.
“Extremely heavily drug affected male for all to see including scared children as pictured on their way home from school,” she said.
“Police resources had been with said male for over an hour and then moved him up the hill.”
In March, news.com.au published several articles on the area, including one which showed disturbing footage of a man overdosing outside commission flats next door to the MSIR.
The footage showed a woman hovering over a man in the darkness, holding a needle to his neck that she later revealed contained “pure heroin”.
Within minutes, the man began stumbling around an slapping himself in the face.
“He just had a whack of pure heroin, I shouldn’t have given it to him, f***. Any Narcan?” the woman could be heard asking in reference to the antidote to opioid drugs.
When news.com.au visited the flats, residents shared horror stories about what it’s like to live next door to Melbourne’s heroin ground zero.
“I don’t feel safe,” a 51-year-old long-time resident said.
“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 harassment.”
A man in his 30s who had lived in the highrise towers had this to say about the injecting room being located next to a primary school: “It’s the worst idea ever.”
“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.”
The council backflip this month has been slammed by the State Government and Greens MP for Richmond, Gabrielle De Vietri.
She said the decision to vote for moving the facility was “a thinly veiled push to shut down our overdose prevention centre”.
“Any deaths that result from shutting down this service will be on the mayor’s hands,” she said.
The Premier Jacinta Allan reiterated her position that the facility must stay where it is.
“We have no intention to change the operations of the medically supervised injecting facility that is located in Richmond because it is saving lives,” she told reporters.
North Richmond was chosen for the supervised injecting room site because it had the highest overdose fatality rate in Victoria in 2016 — one person was dying every 10 days.
In 2012, the Coroners Court began monitoring heroin-related overdose deaths there and in 2017 it held an inquest into the situation. A trial was recommended and it opened a year later.
An independent review in 2020 supported the trial being extended and in 2023 it was granted permanent status.
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