It's saved lives and for some people, such as drug users like Steve, the injecting room has been a godsend. Others say the streets are less safe and are strewn with dirty needles, and worse.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size It’s a frigid wintry night in North Richmond, a gritty slice of inner suburbia once known as Melbourne’s deadly heroin rectangle. Steve is huddled, in a hoodie and jacket, next to a closed needle vending machine outside the North Richmond community health centre. He lives on the streets and has been using heroin for 33 years. A Victorian Coroner found there was 20 fatal overdoses in the City of Yarra in 2015. She said another 15 died after buying heroin here, a "conservative estimate". A large number of deaths occurred in car parks, toilet blocks, alleys and restaurants around Victoria Street. ‘‘This is not some little drug problem. This is a full blown public health crisis,’’ Premier Daniel Andrews wrote on Facebook. In late 2017 Labor announced it would trial a medically supervised injecting room at the North Richmond community health centre, after decades of policy flip-flops on the deeply divisive issue. Steve has been visiting the injecting room most days since it quietly opened on June 30 last year. ‘‘It’s a very hygienic environment, it reminds me of a hospital,’’ he says. ‘‘They give you all the proper equipment, they give you time to do it properly. On the street sometimes you get a bit rushed, you don’t take the time to clean the swab and all that.’’ Supplies inside the injecting room. Credit:Eddie Jim For now the injecting room closes at 7pm on weeknights, but Steve is looking forward to the hours being extended when it moves to a larger, purpose-built facility on the same site next month. ‘‘It would be good to see them go 24/7.’’ Metres from where Steve is sitting, someone scrawled ‘‘Noodles not Needles’’ on the footpath. The graffiti has been removed. But for some in North Richmond – who feel Melbourne’s "Little Saigon" has become colonised by drug dealers and users – the sentiment can’t be erased. According to the state government, the injecting room is achieving exactly what it set out to do: save lives. More than 2200 people have registered to use the facility, an average of 200 visits a day. More than 650 overdoses, which may have otherwise been fatal, have been reversed. But more than that, says Mental Health Minister Martin Foley, the injecting room has been able to refer vulnerable, at-risk people to other services.


More than 250 people have started opioid replacement therapy, such as methadone, or been referred to other drug and alcohol services. One hundred and fifty have been tested for hepatitis, with 40 people entering treatment. ‘‘These are people with chaotic and dangerous lifestyles, who wouldn’t normally have access to these services,’’ Foley says. No-one disputes the injecting room has saved lives. But as the two-year trial reaches the halfway mark, some locals say North Richmond now feels unsafe and lawless. They believe the trial is failing its stated aims to reduce the number of dirty needles in public areas and make the neighbourhood safer. Letitia Wilkinson lives near the Richmond safe injecting facility and is concerned about its impact. Credit:Jason South ‘‘People definitely feel scared,’’ says resident Letitia Wilkinson. She says residents are dealing with erratic behaviour, especially with ice users, who can be aggressive and intimidating. ‘‘You can open your door at any time and see someone come off ice.’’ When The Age visits, an intoxicated man weaves down Lennox Street, kicking at bins and cars. ‘‘The key concern I have is people are injecting, getting in their car and passing out on Lennox Street,’’ Wilkinson says. There is a school crossing on the street.’’ Steve says drug users encourage each other to use the injecting room out of respect for kids and the elderly, many of whom live in the housing commission flats. But sometimes, he says, when the injecting room is full, they shoot up in the street. ‘‘A lot of people don’t want to wait. It’s too long when you have got a habit and hanging out. Fifteen minutes feels like an eternity.’’ (The new facility will increase the number of people who can use the injecting room at any one time from 11 to 20.) Penelope Drummond and her children Kate and Alex live in the Richmond housing estate. Credit:Eddie Jim For some locals, life has got better. Penelope Drummond lives on the 19th floor of one of the Richmond housing commission towers. In the five years she’s been here, there’s always been an ‘injecting room’ she says, except it used to be illegal and was called a car park.


‘‘My children have seen people lying on the ground, and we didn’t know if they were alive or dead,’’ says Drummond, who is a member of the Richmond Estate Residents' Group. ‘‘They have seen people with needles in their neck, their groin, arms, toes, they have seen people doing group shoot ups.’’ Then the injecting room opened last year. ‘‘Not only is the car park safer but so is the foyer and stair wells and there is less shooting up outside people’s apartments,’’ she says. ‘‘That’s a win for me as a resident on the estate.’’ North Richmond has been described as the ‘‘perfect storm’’ of heroin dealing ever since the illegal street trade took root here more than two decades ago. In a submission to a 2017 inquiry, the Yarra Drug and Health Forum suggested this was due to multiple factors. These included easy access to public transport, the proliferation of alleys, laneways, carparks and housing estates where numerous people involved in the drug scene live and the involvement of some shopkeepers in heroin trafficking. It also reflects the displacement of the illicit drug market from the CBD, Footscray and Smith Street due to gentrification, policing and CCTV. Between 2009 and 2016 there were an average 23.7 fatal overdoses per 100,000 people every year in the City of Yarra – the highest of any local government area in Victoria. A drug user on the street in Richmond last week. Credit:Justin McManus Yarra City Council advocated for more than a decade for an injecting room. But a confidential report in April revealed the impact on the area, with the council saying its ‘‘cleansing service’’ is struggling to cope around the injecting room.


There is ‘‘increased human faeces on the streets’’, with Yarra officers last year having to clean up 200 a week. There were also more discarded syringes (1880 collected from the streets and disposal units each week), security concerns for cleansing staff and increased graffiti and litter. ‘‘Council’s current cleansing resources are at capacity in an attempt to deliver additional services to the area,’’ the report says. ‘‘To lift the area to a greater standard of cleanliness in order to respond to the rising number of resident complaints will require an increase in resources to deliver additional levels of service.’’ A petition calling for the injecting room to be relocated to a commercial area has collected more than 1000 signatures. Richmond locals packed out the public meeting at the All Nations pub in April. Credit:Luis Ascui In early April, Yarra City councillor Stephen Jolly held a community meeting at the All Nations pub on Lennox Street, where he accused Labor of sticking its head in the sand. From this, a resident action committee has formed, which is pushing for the injecting room to be moved. (Jolly has suggested somewhere closer to Hoddle Street in the industrial part of Richmond.) Loading ‘‘Fundamentally it is not in the right location,’’ says Wilkinson, who is chairing the committee. ‘‘We are very clear that wherever it goes it must not be in a high density residential neighbourhood next to a school and a community health centre that is used by the elderly and brand new mums.’’


Jolly is an unlikely person to spearhead this resistance. Few people have fought harder and longer for an injecting room than the militant socialist activist. In 1999 he staged two marches to a Collingwood public toilet block, where six people had fatally overdosed, and with a progressive doctor threatened to operate an illegal ‘‘safer’’ injecting facility. Users on the street in Richmond in 2017, before the injecting rooms opened Credit:Justin McManus ‘‘Thank f--- for that,’’ Jolly thought, when the injecting room was finally announced almost two decades later. But when he began door knocking ahead of next year’s council elections he was shocked to hear resident after resident tell him things had got worse since the injecting room opened. ‘‘At first I thought it was just rednecks. But the more I door knocked in South Abbotsford and that part of Richmond I realised I was wrong. These are not Australian Donald Trump supporters.’’ Jolly knows he is taking a bit of flack from the left: ‘‘It would be a lot easier for me to sit in a pub in Abbotsford, saying ‘Bloody NIMBYs in Richmond’. That’s what most lefties are doing.’’ But he says it’s crucial he and other progressive voices get involved in the debate and push for more nuanced solutions such as moving the injecting room and more affordable drug rehab.

At the last state election the Liberals vowed to close the injecting room within a week if elected. ‘‘If I don’t [get involved], a rightwinger will capitalise on this mood and this debate will rapidly go to the torch brigade, they will come out and want to close the [injecting room],’’ Jolly says. Foley is irritated by what he calls ‘‘cheap point scoring’’. ‘‘It would be disingenuous to say there haven’t been some issues, which some people try to inflame for their own short term political priorities,’’ the minister says.


Every piece of expert advice said the injecting room had to be at the ‘‘hottest of hot spots’’ where the overdoses were happening, Foley says. In any case, it was stipulated in the legislation that the injecting room be located at North Richmond community health centre. ‘‘Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, it’s not capable of being relocated.’’ Injecting room medical director Nico Clark. Credit:Eddie Jim There is a chill out space in the injecting room, where clients can relax after their fix and have a hot drink. The walls are decorated with those intricate adult colouring in pages that many people find quietens their anxiety. For the medical director, Nico Clark, one of the advantages of the current site is the ability to refer clients to other services in the centre while they are in this chill out room. ‘‘It’s certainly the most health integrated model I am aware of. When you go to conferences of injecting room people they talk about the dream model, which looks pretty much like what we are doing.’’ One woman, who occasionally uses the injecting room, rings to tell me she got a job after the dentistry service fixed her teeth. ‘‘There is absolutely no way this would have been possible without having this denture and confidence,’’ she says. ‘‘Prospective employers would have seen this person with a large gap in their resume, severely underweight and missing all her front teeth and made assumptions.’’ Victoria Street traders Meca Ho and Herschel Landes. Credit:Jason South On a corner of Victoria Street a giant red and yellow banner sums up the mood of traders in five words: ‘‘We want our street back’’. The drug trade has taken a grim toll on this former foodie mecca. On a Tuesday morning at The Hive shopping centre, shoppers watch, impassively sipping their coffee, as plainclothes police bust a scrawny dealer. They pat down the legs of his tracksuit next to the travelator to Woolies. There are wads of cash and small ziplock bags with white powder on the ground. A security guard paces by the trolleys at Aldi. The president of the Victoria Street Business Association, Meca Ho, says 18 shops have closed along Victoria Street in the past five years. ‘‘There is increasing petty crime in the area. There is no more families come with their kids for dining, they don’t feel it’s safe for them, so they go to their local Vietnamese.’’ After initially opposing the injecting room, the business association now supports it, saying it saves lives. But it warns anti-social behaviour and drug dealing around Victoria Street is responsible for driving customers away and businesses closing. ‘‘The traders are now asking for their street back and seeking a determined push against the increasing number of dealers and users coming into the area as a consequence of the injecting facility,’’ a pamphlet says. The association is working with the state government on a revitalisation project to ‘‘radically improve’’ Victoria Street. Ho wants to have family days and is campaigning for a pop-up police station. He says traders want to promote a positive message rather than the fear mongering he believes is dividing the community and leading to people moving out. ‘‘Traders are fed up. This is our livelihood, this is where we live.’’ Paramedics attend to an overdose on Victoria Street last week. Credit:Justin McManus Victoria Police says overall crime is down in Richmond since the injecting room opened, something some locals struggle to comprehend. (The most recent statistics won’t be released until later this month.) Acting Assistant Commissioner David Clayton says there had been an increase in people charged over drugs but this was likely to be due to the extra 15 police officers posted to Yarra in the last year. Anecdotally, he says, police had been called to fewer fatal overdoses since the injecting room opened. ‘‘We are supporting the initiative,’’ Clayton says ‘‘Overall I would say some aspects look promising … I think we have still got work to do in some sectors around amenity of the area. Some people’s experience is not very good.’’ The injecting room trial is being reviewed by an independent panel, chaired by Professor Margaret Hamilton, an executive member of the Australian National Council on Drugs. It will report next year. After considering this advice, a decision will be made on whether the injecting room should continue. Meanwhile, Foley believes residents will see a difference when the new injecting room opens next month with extended hours until 9pm weeknights and 7pm on weekends. The state government is working with Yarra Council on cleaning. It’s also addressing lighting and safety at the Richmond housing commission flats to deal with concerns expressed, particularly by the East Timorese community. ‘‘It’s a long game,’’ the minister says. The centre has incentives for drug users who return their needles. Credit:Eddie Jim The North Richmond community health centre has doubled its assertive outreach teams, some of whom are recovered addicts, to revive people who overdosed outside the centre and investigate why some are not using the injecting room. It’s also trialling the closure of the needle vending machine (the needle and syringe program at the centre will remain open) in a bid to stop people shooting up outside. This explains why Steve is patiently explaining to distressed drug users that the needle vending machine is out of action on that chilly Thursday night.

‘‘I think it is out of service. I don’t know why,’’ he says. ‘‘There has been a few people come past already, they are spewing.’’ Steve is adept at triage: ‘‘We’ve got a spoon for you darl,’’ he tells one desperate woman, who shoots up on the spot. ‘‘Don’t go in as deep mate, the needle is longer,’’ he advises another man. ‘‘Wait until you get home eh, not far, it will be better for you anyway, you will enjoy it more mate.’’