Aus - Richmond's heroin problem has gone from tragic to absurd

[poledriver]

Richmond's heroin problem has gone from tragic to absurd

For the three years I have lived in North Richmond, every day I go to catch my tram near the corner of Lennox and Victoria streets I know what I will encounter. I will walk down a street lined with syringes and come across either a drug exchange, a person injecting themselves or find someone laying barely conscious on the footpath.

I work at the local pub around the corner from my house and on a weekly basis we have someone come in attempting to shoot up. The regular punters know to put their foot against the door when someone suspicious walks past - to stop them from entering. The amount of fatalities is a constant conversation amongst patrons and concerned residents living in the area.

Since the end of last year, I have had to call triple-0 numerous times for people who have overdosed in the streets around my area with the calls becoming more frequent. It is not uncommon coming home to sirens at any time, whether it be day or night.

Last week police attended to a stabbing right across from my house. That same week, I walked down my street where I looked into a parked car and saw two men in hi-vis shooting up.

The previous week, I left the park as two people came to shoot up beside me. I left in frustration and went to the park across the road where I sat up on the table top because discarded syringes had been left on the seats.

I sat there contemplating how ruthless the area had become and how desensitised I was becoming because of the frequency of my encounters. I was more exasperated at the fact I couldn't enjoy something as simple as sitting in my neighbourhood park than that a serious problem in my neighbourhood was becoming progressively worse.

Across the road and in between the two parks is a primary school where I see kids crossing the road every day. I fear for their safety. Businesses in the area, including my own workplace, suffer from the amount of drug users and antisocial behaviour the area attracts.

At my last job, at a family restaurant, we had a customer who came in, ordered a meal and went straight to the bathroom. Thirty minutes after his food came out, one of the waitresses went to check on him. He was found lying unconscious in his own blood with a needle sticking out of his arm.

I feel anxious when I walk to the tram stop or come home late at night. I never know what I might have to attend to or if I am going to make it home safely.

Drug deals occur on a regular basis, no longer with discretion. At the tram stop, I have sat on the same seat in broad daylight to where a drug deal was underway. I have been on the phone to the ambulance as a man who had overdosed was given CPR. My housemates have found syringes in our mailbox and I am constantly having to make sure I don't step on any needles on my door step as I leave the house every day.

I am no longer alarmed that this is what is happening in my neighbourhood, but I am disturbed at the fact that it is severely becoming worse and there doesn't seem to be a solution that is working.

Drug users are able to access clean needles from a dispensary across from my house, right next door to the primary school, but there is nowhere for them to shoot up and the needles are not being disposed of safely. The issue is not getting any better because the job is only half done.

Earlier this year, coroner Jacqui Hawkins put forth a recommendation to trial a safe injecting room in North Richmond as a harm minimisation approach, and to expand the availability of naloxone, used as an antidote for heroin overdoses. Premier Daniel Andrews rejected the idea, but government MPs supported a push for a parliamentary inquiry into safe injecting rooms, which is to happen no later than September 5.

I once opposed the idea of safe injecting rooms, worried people would congregate in the area looking for drugs, but the truth is people are going to shoot up regardless of whether it is hidden down an alley or in our front yards.

Thirty-four people died in my neighbourhood last year from overdoses that might have been avoided by providing drug users with a place that is carefully monitored by staff and social workers so they can inject with sterile equipment and dispose of needles safely instead of accidental overdoses occurring and syringes ending up in our streets.

Evidence has shown that safe injecting rooms, such as the one in Sydney's Kings Cross, reduce ambulance call-outs and save lives.

North Richmond is a great place to live - among terrace houses, modern apartments and cheap Vietnamese restaurants and so close to the city. I don't want to leave and if a safe injecting room means I can walk down the street without counting how many syringes I come across or how many lives are being taken, then I fully support the idea as a temporary solution to a bigger problem.

Carolyn Cage is a freelance journalist.

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/richm...ne-from-tragic-to-absurd-20170404-gvdd1q.html

 

[poledriver]

I once opposed the idea of safe injecting rooms, worried people would congregate in the area looking for drugs, but the truth is people are going to shoot up regardless of whether it is hidden down an alley or in our front yards.

Thirty-four people died in my neighbourhood last year from overdoses that might have been avoided by providing drug users with a place that is carefully monitored by staff and social workers so they can inject with sterile equipment and dispose of needles safely instead of accidental overdoses occurring and syringes ending up in our streets.

Evidence has shown that safe injecting rooms, such as the one in Sydney's Kings Cross, reduce ambulance call-outs and save lives.

^ This pretty much sums it up. Addicts will shoot up either way. Wouldnt everyone prefer more and more of the addicts go into a safe space with clean equipment to use that is supervised by trained staff? Sydney's supervised injection centre has been such a long term success that it seems very sad and backwards many other places have not adopted the same approach. Afaik no other places in Australia do such a thing as the Kings Cross (Syd) supervised injection centre.

https://uniting.org/our-services/for-adults/sydney-medically-supervised-injecting-centre

 

[cj]

Yeah when I was using we shot up in the car wherever we felt reasonably safe from cops. Then we threw the needles out in the same fashion. Our main concern was getting used equipment off our person as quickly as possible. We figured it was simply a casualty of war. I have mixed feelings about it now but I don't see how we could of realistically done anything different.

 

[spacejunk]

^ This pretty much sums it up. Addicts will shoot up either way. Wouldnt everyone prefer more and more of the addicts go into a safe space with clean equipment to use that is supervised by trained staff? Sydney's supervised injection centre has been such a long term success that it seems very sad and backwards many other places have not adopted the same approach. Afaik no other places in Australia do such a thing as the Kings Cross (Syd) supervised injection centre.

https://uniting.org/our-services/for-adults/sydney-medically-supervised-injecting-centre

There is a campaign at the moment to set up a safe injecting room in Richmond or Abbottsford - with some doctors and nurses even prepared to set up a non-state sanctioned "guerrilla" mobile injecting room (if a legal solution can't be found)

It would save a lot of lives - the opponents of such a plan (in State/federal govt and councils) have no valid arguments that i can see. Just bloody-mindedness

 

[szuko000]

Yeah when I was using we shot up in the car wherever we felt reasonably safe from cops. Then we threw the needles out in the same fashion. Our main concern was getting used equipment off our person as quickly as possible. We figured it was simply a casualty of war. I have mixed feelings about it now but I don't see how we could of realistically done anything different.

I would make sure I had a plastic water bottle or something (my car back then was a mess anyway) the way I saw it was you would have to open the bottle access the syringe remove the top and prick yourself. Not likely to happen if your of sound mind.

 

[poledriver]

Heroin made life bearable – at the same time as it nearly killed me

I have just read Carolyn Cage's lament for the loss her North Richmond community. Her anxiety amid the "ruthlessness" that has replaced this community ably demonstrates how antisocial behaviour robs once welcoming localities of amenity. I strongly endorse her call for a medically supervised injecting centre in North Richmond. Like Ms Cage, I draw attention to the Victorian Coroner's recommendation that such a facility is needed to counter drug-related fatalities in Richmond (as recommended by the coronial inquiry into the death of "Ms A", a mother who fatally overdosed alone in the toilet of a fast-food restaurant). However, my call is not that of a resident subjected to a profound sense of helplessness. It is a call from someone who spent more than 20 years injecting heroin.

To many, I guess I am a junkie. That is dumb. The presumed knowledge that underpins such assumptions is the most insurmountable obstacle to good drug policy. I was no more "an injecting drug user" than someone is a "coffee drinker". To define an individual by an activity (or a substance) is to narrow and dehumanise the rich detail of their life. It likely ignores the experiences and characteristics that influence involvement in drug use in the first instance.

Yes, reliance upon drugs as a means of self-medication can be very problematic. It's taken me a long time to get "clean" (ponder that metaphor and the corresponding "dirtiness" of the drug user). Nonetheless, at the same time I was using drugs, I was a full-time academic. I was lecturing, researching and teaching classes at the tertiary institution where I have worked since 2000. Perhaps my CV would be more impressive had I not been struggling outside the work space. Still, I built a career in higher education (in marked contrast to tabloid morality plays in which pathetic junkies are responsible for all manner of social ills).

I spent several years fighting crippling mental ill-health that increased the attraction of heroin. This attraction became a devoted relationship when my marriage disintegrated and I was compelled to leave my then-infant daughter to live in isolation and not a little misery. We are often told that the drug user makes the "choice" to stick a needle in their arm. Nobody forced them to start on the "slippery slope" to drug dependence, poverty, criminality and subsequent marginalisation. However, I suggest that, to exercise choice, a person must have two viable alternatives from which to choose. When the only alternative to the medicating properties of drugs is ending their life to end their suffering, can this use be condemned as a "free choice"? Despite the best efforts of the mental health profession, heroin was the most effective medication I discovered. It made life bearable – at the same time as it nearly killed me.

Three times I came to with paramedics standing over me – having been revived with naloxone, a drug that the coroner recommended be made more widely available. In each case, I was thankful that there was someone present to call them. I was thankful my then wife had awoken on one occasion, and my mother on another, and found me unconscious. Otherwise, I would not be here to write this. At other times, I have come to alone, once in a locked public toilet, hours after injecting myself, and lucky not to have stopped breathing forever. I've always thought that my continued heroin use after such incidents is indicative of the drug's allure.

I can say that drug use is no longer an issue. What changed? In early 2015, we "legitimised" my fortnightly heroin use (budgeted in family householding). While that might seem weird, it was the deceit tearing us apart, so we took it out of the equation. Having permission to "use" gave me the "space" to stop using. It was the perspective it allowed, without wasting energy sneaking about and diverting scarce dollars which enabled reflection, consideration and the resolve, for the first time in many years, to take a deep breath and leave it.

I am acutely aware of the trauma that overdose inflicts outside of the victim. Children lose parents and vice versa. My mother saw my near-death first hand – the blue lips, shallow breath and unconsciousness to which I have subjected too many loved ones. The use of drugs in public, not to mention overdose, only spreads drug-related trauma. If such trauma cannot stop someone who loves his family more than he ever loved himself, it should be clear that only outside intervention can reduce the unnecessary fatalities that occur when criminalisation compels the use of drugs away from the public gaze.

A place in which drug use is not necessarily legitimised, but is still facilitated rather than condemned, allows engagement with new perspectives, as well as dedicated workers who can open access to services that serve to counter the issues that often underpin problematic drug use. Trauma, mental ill-health, housing insecurity, poverty and so on are not the fault of the individual in a society increasingly aware of how many people are left behind and ignored in the minority's pursuit of wealth. They do increase the attraction of drugs that can numb the severity of bitter reality. A medically supervised injecting centre, staffed by medical and social service professionals, will not only save lives and reduce trauma, it will be the first step of many to an existence in which drugs are not needed.

Dr James Rowe is an academic at an inner-Melbourne university.

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/he...e-as-it-nearly-killed-me-20170406-gvex1g.html