'Methadone treatment "too expensive" for most addicts'

A new report has found the cost of methadone programs is too high for most heroin addicts.
The Federal Government funds methadone treatment, but most pharmacies charge a $60 dispensing fee.
The RMIT University study found the fee was a barrier for many heroin users wanting to kick the habit.
Report author Dr James Rowe says the Government subsidises dispensing fees for most other medications.

The full article is at ABC News, here.
(Props to Tim.)

Zero tolerance

A re-elected Coalition government would take control of the welfare payments of people convicted of offences involving hard drugs, Prime Minister John Howard announced today.
Mr Howard said welfare recipients convicted of offences involving heroin, cocaine or amphetamines would have their payments quarantined for an initial one-year period which could be extended in some circumstances.
(Read the whole article here.)

Sounds like a good idea.
Except it's not going to stop people from using drugs. It probably means that people will have to make more money illegally (eg. theft, drug dealing, prostitution) in order to support their addictions.
Zero tolerance doesn't stop people from using drugs. And it actually increases the harm caused by drugs. For example, if heroin was decriminalised, it wouldn't cost much, therefore not many people would have break the law in order to maintain their habit. It would also be much safer to use heroin, because people could actually know the purity of what they were using, and not have to worry about whether they're also injecting talcum powder or Special K. People would be able to inject in safe, clean places, rather than having to do it secretly in dirty laneways and squats.
I expect most voters wouldn't agree with me though. What do you think?
There is more about harm minimisation here.

Heroin in The Age

Yesterday The Age ran a number of articles about Afghanistan's heroin industry and the recent increase of heroin on Melbourne's streets:

Hammer horror - the curse of the streets returns
MELBOURNE is set to be caught up in an international tidal wave of high-purity Afghan heroin flooding world markets — with local addicts confirming the more lethal drug is already available on the city's streets.
The potential influx of Afghan heroin — produced from record opium crops flourishing in regions under Taliban rule — has sparked fears that Melbourne could once again become a destination for cheap, high-purity heroin as it was in the late 1990s.

A scourge woven into the fabric of Afghanistan
THE opium poppy symbolises the complexities and dilemmas confronting Afghanistan and its allies.
There are no easy answers in dealing with the crop that has made Afghanistan the world's largest opium producer, supplying 93 per cent of the illegal opium trade.
Opium cultivation accounts for 60 per cent of the Afghan economy and 90 per cent of its exports. More than three million people, 14 per cent of the population of 23 million, depend on it for their income.

Nothing but hits and memories
We cannot allow a repeat of the late '90s heroin scourge
Tragically, smack is coming back and drug experts such as Nick Crofts, from the Turning Point centre in Fitzroy, say we need to do some serious thinking about our treatment service. It is, he says, inadequate and struggling to cope with existing demand, let alone with what is yet to come. Says Dr Crofts: "We are working in a policy environment where the previous premier (Steve Bracks) said very clearly heroin is gone and the only problem we have now is amphetamines. Which is utterly wrong. State Government support for both medical treatment for people with addictions and the pharmaco-therapy program is pathetic."

A few days back it also mentioned Family First senator Steve Fielding's rebuke of the Labor Party for considering giving the Greens preferences, because of the Greens' harm minimisation policies:

'Outrage' at Greens preference deal
"It is absolutely outrageous to think that Kevin Rudd would want to preference the Greens, knowing their stance on drugs, free injecting rooms in streets, free heroin," Senator Fielding told ABC television...
...Senator Brown responded that the Greens' policies on drugs were for harm minimisation.
"Free heroin on the streets - that's absolutely wrong," he said.
"I'm a doctor. I hate drug addiction.
"But we've got to have sensible policies to meet it and we will make sensible policies."

(You can read the Greens' drug policy here.)

'Afghanistan opium crop hits new record'

There's an article in today's Age about Afghanistan's heroin industry. This article from last year is also worth reading.

Tobacco, heroin, fish oil

At about midnight a few days ago, I was heading through the laneway on my way to the Den to drop some stuff off there, and this guy asked me for a smoke. I said I didn't have any. He said he'd seen me smoking the other day, and I said he couldn't have because I hadn't smoked for ages, and he admitted that he'd just reckoned I looked like someone who'd smoked. Anyway, it turned out it was this guy me and Gin looked after for a few hours about a year ago, because he'd had too much heroin. (He liked Hillsong, so we'd been getting him to sing Hillsong stuff so that he'd stay awake.)
Once I'd convinced him I didn't have any tobacco, he said he reckoned someone was watching him. I said I couldn't see anyone. He said he heard someone move, and I said I hadn't noticed it. He asked me to keep a look out while he injected though. Once he'd finished injecting he asked me if I liked vitamins. I said I sometimes use vitamin C if I was sick or people around me are sick, and he got out this jar of fish oil pills, and asked if I wanted any. He said they were meant to be good for your brain. So we had some fish oil pills.
He said he's into Planetshakers now.

I took these pictures this morning, after cleaning the laneway:

(Our back laneway is the main place in Melbourne CBD for injecting heroin, so we try and keep it clean so that it's a bit safer. It's called harm minimisation.)

Rock the Casbah

I had The Clash playing pretty loudly yesterday afternoon, and there were some people injecting in the laneway, and one of them started singing, 'Rock the Casbah! Rock the Casbah!'

'DON'T DROP!'

I was just coming back from the grocers before, with stuff for tea, and as I came into the laneway there were two guys coming out, one who I recognised from hanging out with at Flinders Street steps a few nights ago, and another guy who I didn't recognise.
As I passed them, the guy who I didn't recognise yelled out, 'OI!' I stopped and turned around to look at them, and he yelled, 'DON'T DROP!'
I said, 'What?'
He said, 'DON'T O.D.!'
So he must've thought I was there to inject heroin, and that I was going to do it on my own - which is a really bad idea, because then there's no-one to get help if you overdose.

What's been going on

Haven't blogged for a while (but have been updating on how Dad is) because I've been very busy and pretty exhausted.
Dad's been recovering really quickly, so he's going to be discharged tomorrow morning, only four days after his operation.
We've been doing orientation stuff with the new residents (Dave and Stella), which is mostly training and workshops and stuff to help prepare them for the year. On Thursday we did training for responding to heroin overdoses, and the next day (Australia Day) we responded to the first overdose of the year, and people started turning up for a barbeque I'd organised, while the paramedics were trying to get this guy to take narcan!
We had my 'travelling Nana' (last year she went to Borneo, this year she's going to Vietnam and Cambodia) over for dinner.
Last night I went with Bevan to see this band Maverick play at The Stork, in Elizabeth Street. Then this afternoon I was walking through Chinatown to The Den, with Nomes and Stella, and someone yelled out something like, 'Hey, man in the orange t-shirt!' and I expected that I probably had imagined it, but then someone grabbed my arm and said, 'Hey you came and saw us last night!' I had no idea who she was for a sec (I think she had sunglasses on) and had to try and remember what I'd been doing the night before, then realised she was from the band.
Just been skating on the roof of the carpark down the street, and someone was leaning out the window of one of the buildings across the street, yelling out, 'Hi! Hi!' and waving, so I waved back.

Yesterday the concrete people put up a thing so that we can get through the laneway. For the last two weeks it's been completely blocked off, so it's good that we don't have to use the front door all the time now. It might mean there's more people coming to inject heroin during the day as well.

Cleaning the laneway

Me and Ray cleaned the laneway for the first time this morning. The nozzle for the tap was missing. It was probably left on the tap, and taken by someone, to dissolve their heroin in.

The laneway - whose space?

Tuesday afternoon we had a discussion about the laneway, and whose space it is. A lot of people use the laneway. The staff of Collins Street Baptist church park there. This morning most of the church people came in through the laneway. Last weekend we (the Urban Seed residents) moved all our stuff in via the laneway. Three days a week we'll be cleaning it up. Heroin users go to the steps at the back of the Victoria Hotel, just next to our garage, to inject. Foot Patrol come into the laneway every morning to empty the fit bin. People come into Credo lunches via the laneway. Green Collect (particularly EcoPaul) use the laneway a lot, because they keep their compost and recycling bins in the garage. Staff from the Vic's restaurant come out into the laneway for smoke breaks. As of last week a team from Sydney have set up scaffolding, so they can spend the next six months repairing the Vic's 'concrete cancer'. And during the Commonwealth Games there'll be a lot of police and security services around, because the Vic will be part of the International Village.
So the laneway is very much a shared space, between a lot of different groups.

We had a look at the final chapter of the letter to the Hebrews.
The author encourages the Jewish Christians to offer hospitality to strangers (1-3). The laneway is a place where we have an opportunity to do this, by keeping it clean and well lit, in order to minimise the harm of injecting drugs. It's also a half-way point between the street and the building, a kind of neutral ground where we can meet people from the street culture, and gain each others trust enough to venture into each others' spaces, such as our living room or the Flinders Street steps, where a lot of street people congregate.
The author also talks about how he (or she) doesn't consider him(or her)self to be part of the city, but is in fact looking forward to the new city that God is reconstructing (14). The laneway has the potential to be a gateway to God's city. I was talking today to someone who comes to Credo a lot, and he said, 'The thing I like about Credo is that the worst of enemies can come and eat together, and have a civilised conversation.' Sounded like God's city, and reminded me of what Isaiah prophecies about God's kingdom:

The cattle will graze among bears. Cubs and calves will lie down together. And lions will eat grass as the livestock do.
(Isaiah 11:6)

'The heroin guilt trip'

THE tragic case of Nguyen Tuong Van has generated much debate about the appropriateness of capital punishment for heroin traffickers. His execution in Singapore late last year was felt by many to be appropriate because, as one columnist put it: "Heroin makes people do bad things to themselves and to others. We must ensure people don't use it."

But is it really the restriction of supply, through prohibition, that prevents the disintegration of society as we know it?

Read the whole article here.
Props to Mark.

Who's the addict?

One question we asked a few times this week at Urban Seed was, 'Who's the addict?'
Twenty-five percent of Melbourne's heroin use takes place in the laneway behind Collins Street Baptist Church. At the same time, near the front entrance, someone is spending thousands of dollars on a shirt or tie. However, these two addictions are seen very differently.
This led to talking about how our addictions to consumption effect other people (like the people who make our clothes or grow our coffee) and the idea of getting addicted to good things, like prayer or reading scripture or recycling. Marcus told us about this guy who got off heroin by getting addicted to Catholicism.
At lunch yesterday I talked to a guy who's been off heroin for seven months, with the help of more socially acceptable drugs: alcohol and marijuana. He's hoping to eventually get down to just tobacco, and then give that up too.