Community consultation on the report ended on Friday and a government spokesman said a decision had not been made yet,despite the government purchasing theformer Yooralla building in Flinders Street for a reported $40.3 million in 2021 as the site for a safe-injecting room.
“We will await the findings of Ken Lay’s report,which is expected in the middle of this year,” the spokesman said.
Campaigning by residents was instrumental in delivering the North Richmond supervised injecting room and people like Daley,Chris Lamb and Jill Mellon-Roberts want to show their support for a similar facility in the CBD.
However,not all CBD residents support a supervised injecting room in the city centre.
Residents 3000 president Rafael Camillo said he could not speak for the group as a whole but as an individual,he thought the government should be focused on rehabilitation facilities for drug users rather than another supervised injecting room.
“For me it is like a Band-Aid solution to the problem,” he said. “I would prefer to put money and time to rehabilitation beds and try to help those people who have put up their hands and are asking for help.”
Lamb has lived in the CBD for 13 years and said “the sooner the better” for a supervised injecting room.
“I have consistently criticised those who love the idea of an injecting room but not in my backyard,” the 77-year-old said. “There are no backyards in Melbourne. We are all in the same yard and it is a front yard,not a backyard. You have to understand we are all in this together.”
The campaign has particular resonance for CBD resident Mellon-Roberts following the death of her son,who was a heroin user.
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“It is extremely necessary,” she said. “I don’t want other people’s kids to be statistics. Mine is.”
The most recent data collected by the Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association records 309 heroin-related ambulance callouts in the City of Melbourne in the 2021-22 financial year.
The figures show there was a 28 per cent increase in heroin-related ambulance callouts in the City of Melbourne between the 2020 financial year and 2021.
There were 29 people who died from a heroin overdose in the City of Melbourne in the two years to June 2022 and the municipality has the highest number of heroin deaths of any Victorian local government area.
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Victorian Alcohol and Drug Association chief executive Sam Biondo said there was a clear rise in heroin overdoses in Melbourne’s city centre since COVID-19 lockdowns ended.
“We need to find solutions to these extremely complex problems,” he said.
“Telling people to go away isn’t going to work. Telling people not to use drugs has been an abject failure for many decades. Harm reduction does save lives and through a mechanism like a medically supervised injecting room,we are able to support people to move away from their addictions as well as access better services.”
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