No

Just Say ‘No’ to Drug Injecting Rooms

3 May 2023

4.8 MINS

Why are our leaders obsessed with pushing the drug plague down our throats?

Wow, this is just plain scary. Here are four recent headlines taken from one online newspaper in one city: the Herald Sun in Melbourne, Australia. They tell us all we need to know about life in Dictator Dan’s decadent drug dystopia:

– Push to allow kids to use Richmond injecting room
– Another injecting room planned for the CBD
– Over 100 overdoses a month at injecting room
– Boss of controversial injecting room resigns

This is shockingly diabolical. Let me quote just a bit from the last two pieces:

More than three times as many people a month are overdosing on drugs at the trouble-plagued North Richmond injecting room, compared to a similar facility in Sydney’s notorious Kings Cross. The Herald Sun can reveal there has been 43 overdoses per month at the Kings Cross injecting room since opening in 2001, compared to a whopping 124 per month at North Richmond since the trial began in 2018.

It comes after the state government introduced legislation in March to make the North Richmond injecting room permanent. The legislation will be debated in state parliament next week. Several residents have also raised “serious concerns” in the past two weeks, saying there had been overdoses and safety issues nearby the injecting room.

And this:

The chief executive of North Richmond’s controversial injecting room has quit after almost three years in the job. The Herald Sun can reveal Patricia Collocott, who began her role as chief executive in 2020, has resigned just weeks after the Ryan review into the facility was released. She is the facility’s second chief executive since it opened in 2018.

The injecting room’s first chief executive, Demos Krouskos, was stood down in late 2019 after two outreach staff members were charged with drugs trafficking offences. North Richmond Community Health would not reveal the reason behind Ms Collocott’s resignation, but the Herald Sun understands recent demands of the job and the Ryan review had contributed to the decision.

Paul Geyer will now take the role as interim chief executive until the position is filled. It comes after it was revealed on Monday that kids would be free to inject drugs under a plan by the Victorian Greens to broaden access to the state’s only supervised injecting room.

Yeah, let’s open more such hell-holes and even allow children to shoot up. This is the utter madness of a deranged government led by a man who is intent on destroying this state in every way he can. I have written before about this issue. Some 13 years ago I said this in part about the heroin injecting rooms being pushed for Melbourne:

Injecting room advocates often make deceptive arguments, such as: “What would you prefer, having addicts shoot up in dangerous, dirty back alleys or have addicts shoot up in clean, medically-supervised rooms?” Of course if these are the only two options, the latter is to be preferred. But this is a false dilemma. There is a third option: not shooting up at all. Shooting galleries do nothing to encourage addicts to get off drugs.

Orlando McDonald is the man who introduced the concept of injecting rooms in the Netherlands a few decades ago. He has admitted that not one person has ever gotten off heroin in this period. In fact, addicts said that if it weren’t for all the heroin they were being supplied with by this program, they might have been off the stuff years ago.

Supplying heroin to addicts is as helpful as supplying whisky to alcoholics. This will simply create life-long addicts. This is not helping people. This is keeping them strung out for life. Such a policy is morally bankrupt and socially disastrous.

And we have proof of this from other experiments in shooting galleries, most notably the Kings Cross injecting centre. Careful studies of this have found that it is certainly not the panacea that many hoped it would be. One assessment of it is worth noting.

Lucy Sullivan begins her study this way: “The overwhelming conclusion to be drawn from the four official Reports on the Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC), which together cover its operation from its opening in May 2001 to April 2007 (six years), is that the unavailability of heroin is of far greater significance in preventing drug overdose deaths than the availability of a ‘safe’ injecting facility – in fact the latter shows no measurable effect at all.”

And in a 2017 piece I examined what an expert report said about the situation in NSW. Among other things it said this:

“Objections to the injecting room were that it would: 1. increase drug taking 2. increase drug trafficking 3. create a honey-pot effect for drug dealers around the injecting room. THE EVIDENCE HEREIN INDICATES THE INJECTING ROOM DID ALL THREE.”

The report concluded with these recommendations:

1. That the injecting room be closed and the funding redirected to establishment of more beds in rehabilitation centres which focus on ultimate abstinence from use of illicit drugs.
2. That the NSW Government follow the lead of the WA government and significantly fund naltrexone implants for those wishing to become abstinent (including drug-dependent prisoners).
3. That the NSW Government examine the Swedish model and its restrictive drug policies. This includes the adoption of strong policing of street selling and a replication of the Cabramatta model which resulted in a significantly lowered overdose rate (policing of supply and demand).
4. That the NSW Government examine abstinence-based rehabilitation programs which have shown considerable success, including Australian programs such as the Salvation Army and Drugbeat (South Australia), as well as international programs such as Hassela (Sweden), San Patrignano (Italy) and Daytop International or Phoenix House (United States).

As to some of the recent madness being pushed by Dan Andrews in Victoria, the head of the state ACL, Jasmine Yuen, has told her supporters:

I’m writing to ask you to complete an urgent survey to oppose the second drug injecting room in Melbourne CBD. As you may know, the community and businesses in North Richmond have been negatively impacted by the drug injecting room that was on trial since 2018. Being close to a primary school, the facility puts children’s safety at risk and has exposed them to needles, and to people who have over-dosed or died in the street.”

She continues:

This week, the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Amendment (Medically Supervised Injecting Centre) Bill 2023 will be debated in the Upper House. The Andrews Government is determined to make the North Richmond facility permanent. I encourage you to email or call your Upper House MPs to express your concern.

While the bill will likely pass to make the North Richmond injecting room permanent, we need to fight to stop the SECOND injecting room proposed for Melbourne CBD. After years of independent consultation led by Ken Lay AO APM, there is still no report on the proposed second injecting room and its location. Instead, the government has now launched a community consultation. Please complete this survey by 16 May to express your concern.

Drug injecting rooms are never the solution. They turn neighbourhoods into a honey pot for drug dealers and send a message to children that using drugs is fine. The government should instead fund rehabilitation programs to help people get off drugs. Please use the survey to oppose the Melbourne CBD injecting room and encourage your friends and family to complete the survey, too. Thank you for taking action and please keep this in your prayers.

Yes we must all stand against this monstrous war on our most vulnerable and on our children.

___

Originally published at CultureWatch. Photo by cottonbro studio.

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2 Comments

  1. Jim Twelves 3 May 2023 at 8:22 am - Reply

    Bill, you have certainly been a warrior against the drug culture for a long time. Thank you. I particularly appreciate your ‘argument’ against ‘safe’ injecting rooms.
    Let me put another perspective on President Dan though. I don’t know him at all, I simply know the oft repeated ‘news conferences’ with his characteristic ‘stoop’, and his ‘condescending tone’ as he ‘told’ Victorians how to live in his state.
    I don’t think he wants to destroy Victoria, rather the ‘drug of power’, that he is addicted, to simply blinds him to the harm he is doing to his people, his family. His family needs to wake up and give this man some help to get off his addition, rather than keep on giving him more for the addiction he already has. However, I fear the majority of Victorians are also now addicts, addicts to being told how to live.

  2. Bill Muehlenberg 3 May 2023 at 10:30 am - Reply

    Thanks Jim.

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