Injecting Room: Synod’s Social Failure
This past week in the Parliament, I spoke on the Drug Summit Legislative Response Amendment (Trial Period Extension) Bill. The main purpose of this Bill is to extend the current trial of the medically supervised injecting centre for an additional four years, until October 2007.
This is the heroin injecting room at Kings Cross, funded by the Government, but operated by the Synod of the Uniting Church. When the Uniting Church offered to run this drug centre, following failed attempts to find a university or a teaching hospital that would do it and the Vatican’s blunt refusal to allow any Roman Catholic order permission to do it as being un-Christian and unethical, many spoke out against the Uniting Church in Australa’s Synod’s offer to run it.
A survey of its results were taken, and the Government, pressed to be seen doing something to reduce the number of people addicted to drugs, decided to keep the heroin injecting room open for four more years. It is believed that the extension will provide an opportunity to monitor information and data over a longer period of time. The results already show that the decision by the Uniting Church Synod to operate what other countries regard is illegal and improper, is one of the worst social justice decisions the Synod of the Uniting Church has ever made.
I said in the Parliament: (extract from Hansard)
“I commend the independent evaluation committee and the New South Wales Expert Advisory Group on Drugs for their report. I have no argument with the way the report was formulated but I have numerous comments to make about its content.The bill amends part 2A of the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act 1985 to extend the trial period for four years, to October 2007 and to complete the review of the licence by 1 May 2007. This will be after the next election, so the issue will not become a matter of election debate.
This is a matter of urgency because the lease on the current premises in Kings Cross has almost expired. The bill seeks to extend the licence currently in force for the whole of the proposed extended trial period and provides that the extension may not be challenged in the courts.
Honourable members would recall that during the Drug Summit the Government stated its aim was to help people find the path to recovery. Unfortunately, experience has shown that very few addicts who have gone to the Kings Cross medically supervised injecting room have been put on the path to recovery. In fact, they have reached a dead end.
The people in the injecting room have failed to help people’s lives to be free from drug addiction. The injecting room is, in point of fact, a maintenance facility. Parents throughout New South Wales who have seen millions of dollars allocated to the injecting room want to know what the Government is doing to help get kids off drugs and to stop them injecting illegal drugs as this room now facilitates.
My preference would be for the injecting room to be immediately closed and for all funds instead to be made available for treatment and rehabilitation services by all levels of government, for prevention, an introduction to addiction programs and for a review to be undertaken of the results. That would result in a totally different response.
It is almost impossible for people in the community to read a true press report about the heroin injecting room in Kings Cross. If I were the Minister responsible, I would not be overexcited by the press reaction because obviously very few journalists who have written articles favouring the injecting room have studied closely the report.
Reverend the Hon. Fred Nile, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, said that the Kings Cross shooting gallery was a dismal failure. Over the 18-month trial of the centre $3.7 million has been spent. He estimated that that amount would have provided for more than 150 residential drug rehabilitation beds to help keep young people off drugs.
Out of the 3,810 individuals who registered at the centre, only 235 clients were referred for any kind of treatment, and that was mainly for medical treatment for hepatitis B, hepatitis C, skin conditions and the like. Only 140 took up any referrals, and no evidence has been provided as to how many of the 140 clients were cured of their drug addiction or even completed the drug rehabilitation programs.
There was no follow-up whatever and no attempt to systematically help people into rehabilitation programs. The six overdose deaths were assessed as being prevented by the staff. The dramatic decrease in drug overdose deaths was the result of the heroin drought that occurred concurrently, not because of the injecting centre.
This centre has been a dismal failure. I can say from personal experience of helping to run rehabilitation centres over many years that if that amount of money had been provided to any drug rehabilitation program, such as the Salvation Army’s Bridge Program, or a Wesley Rehabilitation Services program, scores of lives would have become totally free of drugs.
I object to the shooting gallery report on other grounds. Culturally, it sends the wrong message about drug use. More than 10 per cent of those responding to the question said that the presence of a shooting gallery would increase their drug use. One would expect that the Government would want to decrease drug use. If more shooting galleries were approved as requested, the result would be a further 650 users state-wide.
It is obvious that the program condones the use of illicit drugs. Pregnant patients were excluded from the trial because of concerns about the effects of these agents on the developing foetus and the Government’s disinclination to be held responsible for such documented damage. I refer to the significant and worrying comments on the New South Wales Government’s Health web site about the impact of illicit drugs on pregnant patients.
The Government ends up being caught two-faced on the consequences of illegal drug use, saying that illicit drugs are not to be used and then legally allowing them to be used in these premises.
Medically speaking, it assumes that these drugs can be given short term or long term to patients without any difficulties.. The fact is that the drug injecting room has maintained heavy users in their habits. The reports confirm a significantly worse health status of drug injecting patients compared to non-users, despite the long involvement with treatment services. This includes immuno-suppression with decreased wound healing, increased infections with bacterial and viral agents, increased emotional and psychological impacts and drug users’ lifestyle deficits, including decreased child rearing and reproductive fitness. This is all very relevant to the age group of the people using these drugs.
Medically speaking, the continued use of illicit drugs, whether it be in the injecting room or in a back lane, always increases poly-drug use, hormonal detriments, depression of mental and physical activity as well as nutritional and lifestyle factors.
It is worth looking at the mortality rates reported in the report. The mortality analysis is methodologically in error. Why were the names and dates of birth of the 3,810 patients not run through the New South Wales registry of deaths to see if they had actually died after shooting up drugs in the church-run premises? That is a serious omission.
It can still be used to provide an urgent correction. It is a mandatory requirement of the harm minimisation hypothesis that one should check what happened to those 3,810 patients. It is a simple act to run them through the New South Wales registry of deaths. Why was it not done? Other researchers use these registries in this way.
Overall, I believe the report was written by some of the leading harm minimisation spin doctors of this nation. There are many examples in the report of overt and implicit bias. As honourable members would know, for many years I have run Wesley Mission in the heart of Sydney, and I have run a whole range of drug rehabilitation programs.
I could very easily bring into this House 20 people who in the past year or two have been totally freed from drugs and are now living a worthwhile life in the community. Many of them are employed and most of them have been restored to their families. Why did these residential rehabilitation programs not receive any funding from the Government? Why was not one person recommended to these programs through the medically supervised injecting room run byb the Uniting Church? Why is the Uniting Church Synod refusing to use its own rehabilitation programs?
The rehabilitation approach prevents addictions developing, helps rehabilitate those on drugs and educates people about the consequences of addiction. We believe that we should restore and reform the individual. The Government must help clients get over addiction, not encourage them in it.
There were two justifications for developing the Kings Cross injecting room. As Mr Carr said on 21 June 2001, it was “to get people into rehabilitation programs”. The fact is that it did not occur. There were only 700 referrals to anywhere, and most of them were for medical problems. Only 16 people entered rehabilitation, and no tracking was made of what happened with them. The second reason was to save lives, but we cannot point factually to one life being saved. It is not just a criminal problem, as the Hon. Dr Arthur Chesterfield-Evans said-and I agree; it is a medical issue, and therefore it needs the best of statistical analysis.
I think there is spin doctoring going on in terms of the medically supervised injecting room. I spoke with the medical director about how much time she actually spends in the centre. The fact is that she also runs the Kirketon Road centre; she is there most of her time. Far from being a medically supervised centre, it might be more correctly titled a nurse supervised centre. Only a limited number of persons received any physical nursing or medical help on that site.
The medically supervised injecting room has lost the confidence of the community. The public rejects it. We have met with people in the Kings Cross area, the chamber of commerce and so on, and there is no support whatever from these people.
For the Minister the bottom line is this: Do we focus on keeping people on drugs or focus on getting people off drugs? The whole purpose of the medically supervised injecting room is to keep people maintained on drugs. Although the injecting room has been tolerated by many of us in the community who have questions about its effectiveness, the report itself does not give us any comfort because of the huge expenditure of money.
It is recognised that the Carr Government needed to explore as many options as possible provided to it through its drug policy advisers at the time of the Summit but in doing so the experiment has reached its end and another experiment should be tried.
I encourage the Government to put its money instead into rehabilitation programs, prevention programs, education programs and the like. In calling for more treatment and rehabilitation from the injecting room, the Government’s drug advisers have caused millions of dollars of waste and tens of thousands of lost opportunities. The injecting room still stands in breach of all international agreements on such issues.
Some still argue that it should not continue to assist with the related activities of drug users’ continued use of illicit substances but should instead be more concerned with a greater focus on prevention, treatment and rehabilitation. The injecting room always was in breach of international conventions dating back to 1912, and on 19 April 2003 was condemned by the International Narcotics Control Board of the United Nations.
The fact that five other States and the Northern Territory have clearly stated that they see no future for injecting rooms under their jurisdictions should be a sober message to our Government.
Finally, I mention a couple of interesting points. What was done to ensure that injecting drug users were moving towards treatment and not simply using the safe haven as a place to push their own limits on drug use? There is no question that overdoses occurred at a higher rate than that for the rest of Kings Cross. Some estimates place it as high as 36 times those injecting out in the street.
What is the Government doing to help drug users see that a safe haven does not help them in recovery but condemns them to it? Indeed, it would appear that the medically supervised injecting room has increased drug dependence. It does not have any runs on the board as far as bringing people off drugs is concerned. I believe that we should have a commitment to education, prevention and rehabilitation, not to maintaining the habit.
I conclude by indicating that there was no improvement in almost every success or failure indicator mentioned in the report. I will not mention every page of the report, but from pages 60 through to 147 the following points are made. There is no evidence that the injecting room reduced the number of overdose deaths in the area. There was no improvement in ambulance overdose attendances in the area, in ambulance overdose attendance during the hours the injecting room was open, in overdose presentations at hospital emergency wards, and in HIV infections and hepatitis B infections. In terms of notifications of newly diagnosed hepatitis C, it was worse in some areas of Darlinghurst, and there was no improvement in Kings Cross. In terms of new needle and syringe use, no advantage was displayed by the injecting room over the nearby needle exchange program. There was no improvement in the re-use of someone else’s syringe and in tests taken for HIV and hepatitis C.
Only 20 per cent of written referrals to various forms of assistance were followed through. Less than 8 per cent of injecting room clients were given written referrals to drug treatment and rehabilitation. At first residents reported fewer sightings of public injection, but businesses reported no improvement. There was initial improvement in publicly discarded syringes at the peak of the heroin drought but this slipped backwards to no improvement. Referrals were almost all for health problems, not for rehabilitation.
I am not interested in making any moralistic judgments but I want to make a factual judgment. This experiment was too expensive, it had too limited a response, it was too inadequate to be a success, it helped too few people and it was run by a group of people with a rigidly philosophical attitude to keep addicts in their addictions rather than rehabilitate them.
For those reasons I will vote against this bill and I hope that the Government will see its way clear to use the money that it would allocate to keep this injecting room open, for education and rehabilitation programs.”
I believe that the heroin injecting room has been the Synod of the Uniting Church’s worst social action.
THIS IS GORDON MOYES.
