Pubdate: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 Source: Herald Sun (Australia) Copyright: News Limited 2000 Contact: PO Box 14999, Melbourne City, MC 8001 Australia Fax: (03) 9292 2112 Website: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/ Author: Michael Barnard REASON AT HEART OF THE 'NO' LOBBY OUT of touch . . . in a state of denial . . . people who neither care nor think . . . a self-proclaimed moral majority forever shouting "No!" Who are these weirdos? Well, if you follow the public exchanges, you'll recognise them immediately: they're the opponents of legally sanctioned heroin injecting rooms. Devils incarnate, no less, who lack experience in the field and are incapable of empathising with the terrible suffering of drug addicts and their families. Nothing could be further from the truth. Forget the odd silly cry from the fringes. Go to the heart of the opposition and you'll find people who care only too much. People who have done their clinical homework. People, even, who have "been there, done that". People whose opposition to perpetuating hard-drug dependency in lawful parlors is grounded in priorities that put education, prevention and rehabilitation first. When I encounter gratuitous attacks on the opponents of shooting galleries, I think of people such as Dr Joseph Santamaria, a consultant physician who has worked in the field of alcohol and drug addiction for more than 30 years - exemplary service in the public interest. No, this doesn't make him infallible. But it certainly makes him knowledgeable and caring. Dr Santamaria, as editor, recently published a series of contributed essays, drawn from international experience, on the downside of "safe" injecting rooms and on other drug issues of the day. The book, "Drugs Dilemma: a way forward", is available in some book-shops or direct from News Weekly Books (9326 5757) for $13.95, GST included. Contributors include Elaine Walters, an educator who has written widely on cannabis, Dr Lucy Sullivan, Sydney academic and board member of Drug-Watch Australia, and Athol Moffitt, a former judge of the NSW Supreme Court. Here, however, I would like to concentrate on a lesser-known contributor, a young Melbourne woman, because her story offers a perfect rebuttal to today's familiar smears. Inexperienced? Hardly. Sharon PoJiock was the victim of an agonising workplace accident in which her spine was broken. Part of the treatment was morphine. She became addicted. It took years for her to break free - a painfully slow journey out of a nightmare which is not in the book but which Mrs Pollock permits me to mention here. No empathy? Hardly. Once fully recovered Mrs Pollock became fired with a passion to bring hope to others. She joined Westside Community Care, a church-backed venture based in Maidstone and operating among western suburbs youth. So overwhelming were the needs found in the shadow of drugs that last year the project was put in abeyance while Mrs Pollock and a nurse travelled overseas to research best-practice models in detoxification and rehabilitation. IT is Mrs Pollock's experiences in such places as Switzerland and the Netherlands - the jewels in the crown of the shooting gallery lobby - that form the basis of her diary record in Drugs Dilemma Closed mind? Hardly. She left Australia "uncertain of my feelings", but returned with "the clear certainty that injecting rooms are not the way to go". Mrs Pollock quotes a clinic director in Zurich as saying "I don't believe in telling people what to do with their lives. Some participants have been on the heroin program for five years, since its inception." He also says: "Every one of our people still use (drugs) on the streets." The clinic, apparently, has about 100 clients a day and each can inject heroin, on prescribed limits, up to nine times daily, with a minimum half-hour between shots. And so to Arnhem in the Netherlands, to a clinic where there is a much larger clientele -- about 450 in any one day -- and where they smoke heroin rather than inject it. Here the manager claims to have been the innovator of "safe" injecting facilities 10 years ago: and no, he admits, "in 10 years I have never got anyone off heroin". Yet in Australia we have some leading advocates of shooting galleries firmly on the public record as favoring wholesale drug decriminalisation. Mrs Pollock sees better hope in compulsory detoxification and long-term rehabilitation centres such as in Hassela, Sweden. Possibly the wisdom is sinking in, given the recent State Government announcement of youth detoxification units (albeit on a mini-scale) for Geelong and Ballarat. Plus continuing signs that firm police action in Melbourne is bearing fruit. Who knows, we might yet come to a collective conclusion that supplying buckets of "safe" petrol to arsonists is no way to stop a deadly fire. - --- MAP posted-by: John Chase