SOLUTIONS, NOT TALK, NEEDED FOR ICE CRISIS

IN 2015, the Geelong Advertiser made headlines of its own and won awards for its powerful series Breaking Ice, looking into the impact of ice addiction on our community. It was a revealing and often heartbreaking series of stories, sharing the experiences of families, support workers, emergency services and the users themselves to lift the curtain on a drug that insidiously worked its way into every corner of our community.

At the conclusion of the series, a special ice summit was called for the region, leading to government pledges for funding.

A petition of more than 2000 names calling for a new governmentfunded ice rehab centre in Geelong and an overhaul of state legislation was delivered to MPs, who all spoke openly about the need for action.

Fast-forward to 2021 and the picture is grim.

Every piece of evidence collected by Geelong Advertiser reporters Harrison Tippet and Olivia Shying in recent months shows Geelong’s ice addiction continuing to grow every year, pointing to a crisis that shows no sign of abating.

Police statistics reveal ice use and possession offences have doubled since that 2015 summit was held, ambulance call-outs have more than quadrupled and rehab waiting lists have blown out to an average 6-12 months.

Geelong has been labelled a hot spot for the state’s overdose crisis, with locals almost three times as likely to die from illicit drugs than the Victorian average.

It is pretty clear that, despite all the shared concern when the spotlight was shone so directly on the issue all those years ago, current strategies are not working. Instead, our health and legal systems are being inundated and are under threat of being overwhelmed by an issue nobody can say they did not see coming.

So how do we halt the decline? What do we need from our governments to finally elicit some meaningful change on an issue that affects people right across the community?

Over the coming days, the Geelong Advertiser will again delve deep into the local ice crisis to track its evolution since 2015 and show the true cost of this drug to our region.

The stories — such as local businessman Dain Kindred’s today — are gripping, eye-opening and can make for difficult reading. But they are so important in revealing the real impact of an issue that it feels many have tossed into the too-hard basket.

In 2015 Geelong’s ice crisis was so bad a task force was established and a summit was called.

Today, with the problem escalating by every conceivable metric, we owe it to our region to leave no stone unturned until we finally see some meaningful action to address this other devastating pandemic.