I’ve used heroin off and on for decades now. I still do.
Throughout my 20s, I had used drugs in ways that were often destructive to me. Back then, I worked 40 hours a week in a paid job a lot of the time, but at other times I was homeless, seemingly always in withdrawal, and desperate for dollars or drugs.
Looking back, I was incredibly destructive. I ripped off shops, crashed cars and got in trouble with the cops. I had hepatitis C (of which I have been cured), have overdosed multiple times and developed infections from injecting – often in an alleyway or an abandoned house or a public toilet or a train.
While people have issues with alcohol and other acceptable drugs that make their lives difficult, they don’t go to jail just for buying or consuming their drugs. That fact – and the drive to avoid the police, along with the awful reality of opioid withdrawal – has ensured my decision-making is sometimes focused on immediate relief or safety, rather than long-term health choices.
That is why harm reduction and injecting rooms – such as the one in North Richmond – are so crucial for keeping people alive and healthy.
When I heard the government in Victoria was not going ahead with the CBD injecting room, I felt both sad and angry. If you are using drugs and are dependent on them, you need somewhere safe to use. “Treatment”, “care coordination”, “stigma-free care” and the rest of those nice words about getting people off drugs mean nothing when you are sick and hanging out and just want to get well. Injecting rooms work because they provide safety at this moment of vulnerability.
This immediate safety is something I might seek out if I was using in the city again. Then once that has been sorted, I maybe would seek other support. I have been let down and discriminated against so many times by so many health services I find it hard to ever trust them.
For all those in the media and the CBD hoping to get rid of the people like me: I hope you know that people will continue to use drugs in your doorways or overdose in your back alleys, and know that people only care up until the point it inconveniences them. We are real people – who care, hurt, love and feel. But we are only ever defined by drug use.
It is so depressing that when I look at the list of things in the government’s “action plan” released this week, there seems to be a focus on treatment. It looks, to a cynic like me, as though they are funding a massive team of people to go out and scoop up people and get them into treatment to be helped – whether they want it or not. Sprinkled in there are some things that may immediately save lives, like more naloxone and overdose assistance, but it really is a cold comfort next to the loss of the injecting room.
As a mate of mine said this week: “Fuck, it’s so typical … it was going good with methadone changes [that made it cheaper on the PBS] … I had some money in my pocket and felt like a person again, but now they do this and make us feel like shit again.”
This feels like a betrayal at a fundamental level for someone like me, who has voted for this government and party for years.
It is not just about the injecting room. It is because it is so clear that there are votes in words like “treatment” and “care” – and listening to shop-owners – but not in doing difficult things for parts of the community who aren’t squeaky clean.
The rejection of the second injecting room feels like a rejection of me as a person, partly because the first injecting room here in Melbourne felt like, maybe, they really do see people like me as humans and part of society.
It feels as if I was very naive to believe that.
Even if all the other things they said they were going to do work out well, that rejection will hurt for a long time.
The author lives in Melbourne and has received treatment for his heroin use
In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186. In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 988
