A City of Sydney study found that alcohol-related crime had soared due to an increase in late-night licensed premises. Licensing officers and council rangers were overstretched and extra police numbers were not sustainable, said the acting commander of Kings Cross police, Darren Schott: "There is a direct correlation between the density of alcohol establishments and the level of crime." A former Wayside pastor, the Reverend Ray Richmond, said drug use paled beside "the more destructive and pervasive alcohol problem". Local residents are saying the Cross is the worst it has ever been. Cath Lyons, who has lived in the area since the 1950s, said: "It's much worse than when the Americans were here in the 1960s, and the worst I've known it, due to the alcohol. It used to be that the worst that would happen to you walking through the Cross was that someone would pinch your bum. Now you're scared someone will push a broken bottle into your face." Residents have taken to escorting politicians on late-night tours. The City of Sydney Greens councillor Chris Harris was taken on one last month. "We took a two-hour walk on a Saturday night between 10.30pm and 12.30am," Cr Harris said. "On Bayswater Road, the outdoor crowds were so dense that a pedestrian couldn't walk on the footpath. Crossing Victoria Street we saw well-dressed young people walking down the road drinking from wine-cask bladders. We went inside residences and the noise from the street was extreme; you could only live there if you shut all the windows and stayed in a room away from the street side. If you live in the Cross, you can't expect to be living in Wahroonga, but there are limits to what people can reasonably take.

"The bars were bursting at the seams with people drinking, people were making an unbelievable noise in the street, and what was most disturbing was the age of the drinkers. We saw young girls sitting on footpaths and I'd be surprised if they were over 14. It was like a zoo, very scary and very confronting. It's way beyond the resources of police and council rangers to control it." Council had opposed the Sugarmill's development application, he said, but the decision had been reversed in the Land and Environment Court. Blame has been shifted between the council, the court and the State Government, but the result is such a concentration of licensed premises that "there is now approval for 10,000 people to be drinking in a very small area until 3am," Cr Harris said. More DAs for extended drinking hours are "pouring in", he said. "City of Sydney rangers don't have the power to detain or arrest or ask for names," Cr Harris said. "A police officer can go up to people to stop them drinking or [tell them to] take their drinks inside, but that can't do much. The laws on responsible service of alcohol are obviously being widely ignored, but it's unrealistic to expect a 20-year-old bar person to police the biggest problem in the Cross." Carole Ferrier, who has led Cr Harris and other politicians on the tour, said: "It's out of control, the concentration in a small area. I don't see how they can pull it back, but having politicians see it for themselves might be a start." In an ironic way, the alcohol boom has coincided with the success of the injecting centre, says the writer Mandy Sayer, a Kings Cross resident for 16 years. "The seedy reputation kept a lot of people away," she said. "But now it's the crowd that used to go to The Rocks, coming in and staying until 6am."

She said controls on drinking - stopping people buying more than two drinks at a time, and shutting bars for 10 minutes every hour - didn't work. "People just move on to the next beer barn, and they can do that because there are so many." The all-night power of illegal stimulants has pushed the drinker's clock later so people go out at 10pm and stay out until dawn. Laws pushing smokers outdoors are congesting public areas. Outdoor tables, often in violation of licensing laws, enable bars to expand their limits. As the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported this week, the total amount of alcohol available for sale across Australia rose by 8 million litres in the past two years - of all the intoxicants, legal and illegal, the one that is indisputably cresting the wave is alcohol. Kings Cross is no longer ankle-deep in needles. As the Wayside pastor, Graham Long, said: "In 10 years we've gone from finding 150 needles a day down to two." Instead it is ankle-deep in smashed glass which, each Saturday, council workers clean up - another drain on ratepayers. Loading

"I love it Sunday to Thursday," said Ms Ferrier. "But if I'd known what it was like on Fridays and Saturdays, I'd never have moved here."