Pubdate: Mon, 28 Jun 1999
Source: Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
Contact:  http://www.smh.com.au/
Author: Linda Doherty

INJECTING ROOMS BIG CRIME RISK - JUDGE

A Supreme Court judge has warned the State Government that injecting rooms
would attract drug-addicted criminals and pose problems for the police and
judiciary.

Justice Robert Hulme is the second judge to enter the drugs debate after
Justice James Woods's address to the NSW Drug Summit in late May, when he
urged the Government to support a trial of safe injecting rooms.

The Premier reversed his opposition to the so-called shooting galleries
after Justice Woods's call for innovative drug policy options, but the
Government's official response to the Drug Summit has been delayed until the
end of July to allow time for a Cabinet committee to evaluate the 172
recommendations.

In a letter to Mr Carr and the Opposition Leader, Mrs Chikarovski, Justice
Hulme said it was "inevitable" that drug dealers would establish near
injecting rooms, leading to logistical problems if police had to "tolerate"
these suppliers.

"Is there to be one law covering the supply of drugs to users of injecting
rooms and another law for the rest?" he wrote. "And is this tolerance and
hands-off approach to be adopted in the case of one, two or 100 injecting
rooms?"

Justice Hulme said the "extent of benefit" to society from the needle
exchange program - which has minimised the spread of AIDS and hepatitis C -
was "not apparent in the provision of injecting rooms". "Where is there a
sense of proportion in a proposal which consists of making easier the
consequences of addiction ... and which, if the proposal is to work, must
impose substantial practical limits on the implementation of anti-drug and
anti-crime activities?

"Society may be better served if the drug dealers and the criminal addicts
are locked up, where the risk of overdose is necessarily limited and there
is ready availability of courses designed to discourage drug use." The Drug
Summit resolution on safe injecting rooms, passed overwhelmingly, says the
Government should "not veto" proposals from non-government organisations for
"a tightly controlled trial of medically supervised injecting rooms in
defined areas".

A spokeswoman for Mr Carr said the Cabinet committee welcomed the
contribution of "any member of the community" and was "continuing to gather
further empirical evidence and examine all legal questions that arise from
all 172 recommendations".

One question under discussion is whether the establishment of shooting
galleries would require the Government to change the law and make the act of
injecting no longer a criminal offence.

Mrs Chikarovski said Justice Hulme's letter showed that shooting galleries
were impractical in legal and policing terms.

Safe injecting rooms sent the wrong signal to the community, particularly to
young people, and "as highlighted by Justice Hulme, they are unworkable",
she said.

"In the legal sense they open up a whole range of questions, which clearly
the Government would have to address before even considering the
establishment of such rooms across the State."

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