Pubdate: Thu, 20 Apr 2000 Source: Age, The (Australia) Copyright: 2000 David Syme & Co Ltd Contact: 250 Spencer Street, Melbourne, 3000, Australia Website: http://www.theage.com.au/ Author: Chloe Saltau, Social Policy Reporter OPEN TO IDEAS TO STEM THE TIDE Dr David Penington has spent the best part of the past five years hunting for answers to the heroin problem, for this State Government and the last. He has watched as the line on the graph that charts opiate-related deaths stretched inexorably upwards. Last year it hit 359 deaths in Victoria and it is still rising. The projected figure for 2005 is 496 deaths. "If this were a public health issue with the rising death toll of the kind I have shown you, to say that we would just go on with what we are doing and hope that it gets better, there would be an absolute outcry," Dr Penington said yesterday. "Public health has only advanced because, when we haven't got an answer, we've been willing to try new approaches. We do not have an answer in our present arrangements. It is getting rapidly worse. We've got to be willing to try new approaches, to test new approaches, to see if they work and monitor them, and subsequently make changes as necessary," he said. There is a body of evidence that Dr Penington is accustomed to pointing to when asked how supervised injecting rooms may provide part of the answer, and why other methods of curbing the drug trade and preventing deaths have not worked. He and his team of drug experts have made numerous fact-finding trips to Europe to test this body of evidence. First, global production of illegal opium has increased by a third since 1988, reaching 6000 US tonnes in 1999. And as the Asian opium fields have grown, the price of heroin on the streets of Melbourne has dropped from about $450 per gram in 1997 to about $300 per gram in 1999. The purity has increased - from about 55 per cent to almost 70 per cent. Dr Penington said drug seizures had little or no impact on the price and purity of heroin, and that Customs law enforcement, though important, dealt with less that 10 per cent of the problem. He said supervised injecting facilities in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria have succeeded in saving the lives of users when they overdose, clearing the streets of public drug use and crime, and directing users into rehabilitation and counselling services. - --- MAP posted-by: Greg