Druj Injecting Room

Public money on medically supervised injecting room, in all good conscience, doesn’t benefit greater community. We have more important needs for critical services and should be directing taxpayer funds to meet those basic services first. Every year government spends 2.5 million on this centre for minimization of harm among drug users. I oppose it because of my concerns that the State's harm minimisation policy pays too little attention to advocating no drug use and rescuing people from their terrible addiction but pays too much attention to managing the addiction The injecting room statistically saved less than 0.5 lives per year or 4 lives in 9 years, at a cost of more than $23 million - an extremely poor cost/benefit ratio. So, this is not the best possible use of public money. There is clear evidence from KPMG report that so many referrals made to drug user is ineffectual because rehabilitation services are unavailable due lack of funding. Rehabilitation centers which are rescuing people from drug addiction are missing out from funding while the government spends 2.5million on services which doesn’t represent the best possible use of public fund. Are these MSICs are such a good idea? There is only one centre in Sydney, how can one centre in King’s Cross service the whole of Sydney? How many centers would serve the population adequately? How much would they cost and how would a service like this feed into the rest of the services required providing a comprehensive addiction service, rather than just an injecting room? Drug rehabilitation programmes are widespread and would benefit more, so money that being allocated for drug injecting room would be far better utilize for rehab programme.

The statics in report says that King’s Cross Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MISC) is very busy place. There are more than 12000 drugs user registered in these centre, The MSIC has had low rates of utilisation, running continually below 2/3rds capacity throughout its