Prisoners need syringe programs: experts

drug_mentor

drug_mentor

Bluelight Crew
Joined
Jul 12, 2006
Messages
7,533
Location
Melbourne, Australia
Australian prisoners are in desperate need of needle syringe programs to avoid the risk of disease, drug experts say.

Delegates at a national drug conference in Melbourne voted on Friday to support safe injecting equipment, access to drug and mental health treatment programs and referral to integrated community welfare programs inside jails.

John Ryan, chief executive of Anex, an organisation that promotes drug harm reduction, said there were reports of the same unsterilised needle being used by as many as 100 prisoners.

"We also know that prisoners are up to forty times more likely to have hepatitis C than someone in the general community," Mr Ryan said.

"We need a commitment from governments to have transparency about the serious problems in our prisons and the current dangers to prisoners, guards and our community."

Mr Ryan told AAP no Australian prison had risen to the challenge of providing sterile injecting equipment.

"The fact is that people are injecting in prisons in very unsafe conditions," he said.

Australia has more than 3,000 needle syringe programs operating in the community, which have saved taxpayers an estimated $7.7 billion in healthcare costs, Anex says.

Anex will present a message to government health and corrections agencies on the need for such programs in jails on behalf of the 350 conference delegates.
Click to expand...

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/latest/6139276/prisoners-need-syringe-programs-experts/
 
This is great :), I wish America used the same enlightened approach to dealing with prisoners and not just with needle exchanges. Prisoners there are treated much better as the sentence itself is the punishment not the time and it's the other way around here. It's common for Americans to fight extradition home as they want to be treated more like a human than an animal.
 
^ I remember watching a documentary on "Australia's hardest prison" in Western Australia and there was an American prisoner who was saying how much better our jail system is than America's and how they prisoners are treated like animals over there.
 
I had a mate who was in and out of jail, whenever he went back in he'd try to get a clean syringe in because you can sell them for a killing inside.
 
I had a friend who did time in a US federal prison and there they fashion syringes out of the inside of a pen (for barrell) with something on the end to make a slight point... then they cut across the vein and push the "sharp" end of the pen into the vein and blow the drug into the vein. No shit.
 
In my time in prison I saw desperate inmates do absolutely disgusting things to IV drugs. There was 1 needle on our block that 4 people used regularly (No I was not one of them). The thing was fuckin scary man, it looked like something outta one of them Saw flicks. The plunger was broken so they used the label from a stick of Right Guard to hold it together, there were cracks in the tube that were "patched" up with a glue that was fashioned out of God knows what, and the pin itself was just plain old looking, bent and haggered. The worst part was we had no disinfecting solutions available to us due to security reasons, so these 4 dudes just shot up 1 after the other, which they all claimed was ok cuz "they knew each other from the streets". I think this is a good program, but also remember that in prison if you go and get a fresh pin the guards are gonna know whats up and raid your shit daily. That's just how life is in there, you have no privacy.
 
That shit is nasty as fuck, we always had access to clean needles, dudes used to sell rigs for like $5(USD) for one and they are free on the outside so people just smuggled in cases of 100 and sold them on the inside. Getting aluminum foil was a much much harder thing believe it or not! You could have sold one roll of foil in the prison for thousands! I remember dudes saving foil from some food item and selling it on the yard, it was pretty funny to see foil go for more money then the dope they wanted to smoke on it!!

But then again where Im from the jails are like 5 star hotels compared to that shit you see on Americas Hardest Prison's.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top