David Dinh/213158 Safe Injecting Rooms
Picture this, you are walking down the streets and you see this man sitting on the ground high on heroin, screaming and intensely itching his body. How would you feel? Frightened? Horrified? Imagine how afraid and shocked citizens would be. Would you let your siblings or future children to step foot outside if you knew that they would come across many people like this? I know I wouldn’t. Good morning/ afternoon everyone, as you may all already know, my name is David Dinh and today I will be discussing with you my opinions on Safe Injecting Room. This issue about trialling Safe Injecting rooms in Richmond was announced and bought up by Daniel Andrews, the premier of Victoria on October 30th 2017. First of all what is Safe Injecting rooms? Safe Injecting rooms is a place where people can use drugs sunder the supervision of trained staff, such as medical and health professionals. Although taking drugs is unsafe and I believe that Safe Injecting rooms should be legalized as it allows people to use drugs in a safer environment with access to emergency care and clean injecting objects. People will still use drugs with or without these Safe Injecting rooms so might as well implement these facilities for the community for a safer place to do it.
In Victoria there were 172 heroin overdose deaths in 2015. Thirty-four people have died from heroin overdoses in a four block area near Victoria St in one 12 month period in 2017. Safe injecting rooms can help prevent this drug abuse crisis. A Safe Injecting centre was opened up in Sydney, Kings Cross in 2015, it was a huge success. Through this trial it was found that more than 965,000 injections were supervised, more than 5,925 overdoses were managed without a single death, a number of public discarded needles and syringes halved and the number of ambulance call outs to Kings Cross were reduced to 80% since the Safe Injecting centre was opened. This helped save lives and keep the community safe as finally, someone has decided to help and support the people in Melbourne. Over thirty- five people have died by heroin overdose in North Richmond this past year, and with this, building a Safe Injecting Centre will reduce these deaths.
A Safe Injecting Centre will be built in North Richmond as North Richmond’s drug market has existed for a long time and is also known he place to “score heroin”. This centre will keep drug users off the streets where they are away from innocent citizens, this will make the community safer while the drug users will be in the centre which they can obtain drug information and treatment. Over 80 per cent of people infected with Hepatitis C and /or HIV get it from unsafe injecting use. We can prevent these diseases from being passed around if Safe Injecting Rooms were legalized. These centres can reduce these infections by providing clean and safe need...
