Victoria risks falling behind the rest of the world if it fails to expand on the success of its safe injecting room in Richmond, according to the head of an international harm minimisation group.
The executive director of London-based Harm Reduction International, Naomi Burke-Shyne, is in Melbourne for the organisation’s annual conference and has called on the Andrews government to provide a promised second safe injecting facility in the city’s central business district.
“Drug consumption rooms should be accessible, they should be where people need them,” Burke-Shyne said. “It’s that simple.”
The Victorian government recently introduced legislation to make the safe injecting room at its current location in North Richmond permanent, after more than 6,500 overdoses had been treated at the facility since it opened in 2018 and 63 deaths prevented.
Burke-Shyne, an Australian, said the key to the facility’s success had also been the offering of other important health services as well as housing and legal support.
“People can get tested for hepatitis and get started on treatment within two hours, there are sexual reproductive health services for women, lawyers dropping around, housing officers,” she said.
“Yes, the space has drug consumption, but I think that really underplays how important the holistic approach to supporting vulnerable communities is.”
On Sunday the chair of the Global Commission on Drug Policy and former New Zealand prime minister, Helen Clark, went further, pushing for decriminalisation, saying drug prohibition has been “a societal, economic and moral failure.”
“Where countries have decriminalised the use of drugs, the sky has not fallen in,” Clark told the Harm Reduction International Conference.
“Drug use continues to grow around the world, millions of people are imprisoned for drug possession and millions more are unnecessarily contracting HIV and hepatitis C because of lack of access to effective harm reduction measures.”
Burke-Shyne said there were 16 countries across the world that have introduced drug consumption rooms, or safe injecting facilities. They include France, which opened facilities in Paris and Strasbourg in 2016.
Being presented at the conference on Tuesday are the results of the first-ever controlled trial conducted safe injecting room, which compared the behaviours of people who inject drugs in the Paris and Strasbourg centres with people who live in the cities of Bordeaux and Marseille, where no such centres exist.
The 12-month longitudinal study found those who used the centres in Paris and Strasbourg were less likely to report overdoses, as well as injection equipment sharing, abscesses and emergency department visits. They were also less likely to inject in public and to have committed a crime in the past month.
In 2020 an independent expert panel recommended a second facility be set up in Melbourne to take pressure off the North Richmond service, which had become the busiest in the country. The government responded by announcing it would open one in the CBD.
But those within the alcohol and other drugs sector are concerned the government has lost its appetite to follow through with the commitment.
They point to comments made by the premier, Daniel Andrews, in recent months about “changed drug patterns” in the CBD. The release of a report by the former police commissioner Ken Lay, who was tasked with investigating the possible location for a facility, has also been delayed
The former Yooralla building in Flinders Street – the government’s preferred location for a second injecting room – has sat empty since it was bought for a reported $40.3m in 2021.
Andrews last month said despite buying the building, the second site was not guaranteed and was dependent on the outcome of Lay’s review.
A group of 80 organisations, including the Australian Medical Association, the Salvation Army, several health unions and housing and legal services, responding by writing a joint letter to Andrews urging him to push ahead with the plan.
Burke-Shyne said Victoria was an early and strong adopter of harm reduction policies, such as its needle and syringe programs and access to pharmacotherapy treatments, but could fall behind other jurisdictions.
Fatal heroin-related overdoses dropped across Victoria in 2021, including in the City of Melbourne.
It means the city has overtaken the City of Yarra – where the safe injecting room is located – for the first time on record.
The City of Melbourne also has had the highest number of drug overdose deaths of any LGA in 2021, while Yarra has been declining since the injecting room opened.
