The Victorian government has been described as cowardly after its about-face on a promised supervised injecting room in Melbourne’s CBD. But the decision to reject the recommendation from a major report has been welcomed by those fiercely opposed to the proposal.
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00:00 Fundamentally, at the end of the day, the main issue came down to location.
00:06 The government's been in years canvassing potential locations for a supervised ejecting
00:10 room here in Melbourne's CBD, but everyone proposed, even one that was progressed quite
00:15 a long way, faced fierce opposition from local business owners and other community groups
00:20 concerned over the potential concentration of harmful activity around any established
00:26 facility.
00:27 This prompted the government to sit on this report it commissioned into the need for a
00:33 safe injecting room for more than a year until it finally released it yesterday, revealing
00:38 that it was going to backflip on its own promise to deliver one, despite that report's number
00:43 one recommendation being to deliver a safe injecting room in the CBD, with the report
00:49 saying the evidence shows they save lives and are needed now more than ever, with drug
00:54 use becoming an increasingly prevalent problem and Melbourne Council being the deadliest
00:59 area in the state for drug-related deaths.
01:03 Of course, there's been fierce opposition and it's been a very controversial issue since
01:07 the first safe injecting room opened in Richmond several years ago, but an independent review
01:13 found that that facility has helped supervise more than 6,000 overdoses and saved more than
01:19 60 lives in just a few years since it started operating.
01:23 Health experts are saying that the government's decision yesterday will cost lives and that
01:28 the measures they've announced instead won't go far enough to address what is a very significant
01:33 issue.
01:34 The government is promising $95 million towards tackling this issue.
01:38 That includes a new community health centre in the CBD, an expansion of pharmacotherapy
01:44 services and wider access to drugs such as naloxone, which is a key opioid overdose reversal
01:51 drug.
01:52 Whether or not that goes far enough to address the issue remains to be seen, but it is a
01:56 decision that has been welcomed by local traders here in the CBD who say it's a very significant
02:01 issue that needs to be addressed, but they argue a safe injecting room was never the
02:06 way to go.
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