The Victorian Greens will introduce changes to a government bill in a push to make it easier to open more safe injecting rooms and allow greater access for the “most vulnerable and marginalised” drug users.
The government’s drugs, poisons and controlled substances amendment (medically supervised injecting centre) bill 2023, which will make the currently facility in North Richmond permanent, will be debated and voted on in the upper house when parliament resumes this week.
A trial at the North Richmond facility has saved an estimated 63 lives and safely managed 6,000 overdoses since it opened in 2018.
The Greens say the amendments to the bill are based on the recommendations of an independent review into the facility by the public health researcher John Ryan, which the government relied on when making its decision to make it permanent.
They include changing the wording to allow for more than one medically supervised injecting room to be licensed at the same time.
The Greens upper house MP Aiv Puglielli pointed to a long-awaited report of the former police commissioner Ken Lay, due to be released next month, into the possible location for a second facility in Melbourne’s CBD and said the amendments could prevent the government stalling on opening another facility.
“We’re concerned that if we don’t take this opportunity now with this legislation to get safe injecting right in Victoria, that we will see the government walk away from future rooms in our state,” Puglielli said.
The Greens are also seeking to adjust the eligibility criteria for using the North Richmond safe injecting room, which currently locks out pregnant women, people under the age of 18 and those subject to court orders. People who need assistance injecting drugs would also be granted access to the facility under the change.
The Ryan review – as well as a 2020 review chaired by Prof Margaret Hamilton – recommended expanding eligibility criteria, but the government has emphatically ruled this out.
The Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association’s executive officer, Sam Biondo, said those currently excluded from using the North Richmond facility were some of the “most vulnerable and marginalised individuals in the community”.
“For the life of me I can’t understand why they want to place people at high danger. Through denying these genuinely isolated, marginalised individuals [access], we’re actually losing the opportunity to refer them to other support,” he said.
“Whether that’s treatment, housing, mental health, dental – it’s all the things that make a positive difference to their life and we could find a pivot point for them through that service.”
Biondo said people exiting the criminal justice system were also particularly at risk of overdose.
“Their tolerance level is low, there’s the shock to their system of venturing back into the community and the potential to use in quantities they were previously using which would be sufficient to kill them,” he said.
In 2021 a Victorian coroner recommended the government overhaul the way it supports people who use drugs when they are imprisoned and after their release, following the 2014 overdose death of a man a day after he left the prison system.
The coroner said in the year the man died, there were 220 heroin-involved overdose deaths recorded in Victoria. Of these, more than 40% had spent time in prison and 10 died within seven days of release.
Meanwhile, the opposition and the Liberal Democrats (LDP) are also seeking changes to the bill.
The LDP wants the facility to be able to prescribe the opioid hydromorphone, or Dilaudid, to drug users who haven’t had success with existing treatments such as methadone.
The opposition, meanwhile, wants to ensure safe injecting rooms are located at least 250m from any education or care services. It follows complaints by some community members that the North Richmond facility is currently located next door to a primary school.
The Coalition’s amendments would also seek to boost transparency by requiring regular external reviews every four years, and the release of annual reports.
The opposition is also expected to use question time in parliament this week to grill the government after the release of an anti-corruption watchdog investigation during the Easter break.
The investigation into a $1.4m grant awarded to a union, dubbed Operation Daintree, cleared Andrews and his ministers of corruption but criticised the “increasing influence” of advisers and the centralisation of power in the premier’s office.
