Fix room for addicts finally wins over Sydney’s doubters
AUSTRALIA: In the Kings Cross red-light district of Sydney an anonymous grey door leads to spotless rows of white desks.
There drug addicts shoot up, watched over by medical staff. Users must bring their own drugs and nobody asks where they got them.
For a city where social progressives are in retreat - latenight drinking curbs have shut down scores of bars and law changes that would allow same-sex marriage have been stalled - the English-speaking world’s first medically supervised injecting centre, which opened 15 years ago, harks back to a different era.
That it has survived years of opposition from social conservatives and won the support of police and residents in the inner city is testament to the lives that have been saved.
The medical staff have intervened more than 6000 times to aid injecting drug users who had become unwell or were about to die. Interventions range from giving oxygen or injecting the lifesaving drug Narcane into heroin overdose victims who forget to breathe. Sometimes the staff restart hearts.
To those who argue that medical professionals should help addicts to beat their habit, rather than facilitate drug-taking, Marianne Jauncey, 46, the centre’s medical director - a straighttalking mother of two - offers a clear response.
‘‘You can’t get yourself off drugs if you have died of an overdose,’’ she said. ‘‘So first we have to keep people alive.’’
The centre is the model being proposed for Glasgow - which plans to set up a medically supervised injecting centre or ‘‘fix room’’ after a proposal approved in principle last week.
Scotland’s largest city is estimated to have more than 5000 injecting drug users, at least 500 of whom inject around the city centre and are considered highly vulnerable.
They leave trails needles in public spaces.
The Sydney centre is Australia’s first, and only, medically supervised fix room.
Its annual budget of about £2 million is funded by the government of New South Wales using money confiscated from convicted criminals under proceeds-of-crime laws. of used
The centre’s small desks where users sit to shoot up are busy: about 150 addicts come through the doors each day.
Most are known to the staff and their medical, drug and psychiatric histories have been recorded.
They are asked what substances they intend to inject and what else is in their system, so the medical staff know what to expect.
The facility also acts as a gateway for drug addicts, who include some of the city’s most impoverished, ill and vulnerable people, to obtain basic assistance for living.
The staff include mental heath workers, a dental hygienist and specialists who can help people to obtain emergency and subsidised accommodation.
For Dr Jauncey and her staff the lure of a safe place to use drugs presents an opportunity to talk to addicts and, perhaps, begin to turn their lives around.
‘‘I have learnt to never give up hope.
‘‘When people quit and then go back to using, it’s not a failure of personality or strength of will, it is an inherent part of the condition,’’ Jauncey said. - The Times
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