Pubdate: Mon, 01 Nov 1999 Source: Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) Contact: http://www.smh.com.au/ Author: Malcolm Brown DRUG WAR'S FRONT LINE IS THE GROUNDS OF A KINGS CROSS CHURCH A drug addict, giving his name as Scott Flower, pulled up his shirt sleeve to show the needle tracks on his arm yesterday at St Canice's Parish Church, Kings Cross, and declared himself in favour of supervised shooting galleries. A heroin user for the past 11 years, he had "shot up" in all sorts of places, including places where he feared sitting down because of the risk of needlestick injury. He had seen fellow users die. Three days after the Vatican ruled against Catholic Church involvement in supervised "shooting galleries" for drug addicts, his life was as it was for hundreds of others in Kings Cross and elsewhere, feeding their addiction regardless of official arrangements. Father Stephen Sinn, parish priest at St Canice's, Roslyn Street, for five years, said there would be 300 people turning up at the parish kitchen for a midday meal. Of those, 80 per cent would be drug addicts. "I believe there will be a shooting up facility eventually," he said. "But it won't be the Sisters of Charity running it." A Jesuit, and as such with a special affinity with Rome, he did not question the Church's authority, represented in the edict brought down by the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, that the Sisters of Charity at St Vincent's Hospital should not be involved in supervising a shooting gallery. "My general point is that people will obey but they won't accept the decision because they don't feel they have been listened to," he said. "There is a group within the Church quick to make decisions. I think they are fearful." The issue is set to divide the Church, with rumblings apparent in the Catholic Weekly even before last Thursday's edict, although the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Clancy, officiating at the annual Commissioning of Graduate Catechists at St Mary's Cathedral yesterday, made no mention of it. Father Sinn, 21 years a priest, most of that time ministering to the downtrodden, said that before Mass yesterday morning he had to clean blood off the parish church steps, blood left behind by an addict. He had cleared away "at least half a dozen little heroin balloons".In August, the number of people shooting up in the church grounds, its toilets and the general area was so great that the parish had decided to close down its five-days-a-week kitchen and put the word out that shooting up around the church was not on. "They were shooting up in the toilets because that is one of the few places you can get water, and you need that to mix the drug," he said. "But there were so many syringes being disposed of they were blocking the toilets." The kitchen had opened after a month, and there had been some reduction in the amount of drug abuse. But it had resumed, and he was calling emergency services regularly. In the kitchen, he had had to summon up all his pastoral skill to control spaced out and violent people. Last year, one of them stabbed him in the hand with a flick knife. While he believed an injecting room was inevitable, addicts were meanwhile spoiling the neighbourhood, driving away ordinary people, especially those with children, and dying. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D