Posted by http://www.theage.com.au/daily/980625/news/news8.html on June 25, 1998 at 21:29:22:
Doctors back call on heroin
By DARREN GRAY
A key medical group last night backed the introduction of safe
injecting rooms for heroin addicts.
The call from the Doctors Reform Society comes as Victoria's
largest medical organisation, the Australian Medical Association,
prepares to debate vexed drugs issues such as safe injecting
rooms and medically supervised heroin trials for addicts.
The reform society said the rooms would both reduce the harm
caused by drugs and dealing on streets.
The national president of the society, Dr Con Costa, said:
"There's a lot of benefit from the fact that people, and they could
be your son or daughter . . . being able to go to a surgically clean
area, and use clean needles."
He said the community needed to consider addicts like they
considered people with any other disease, and not as criminals,
misfits or outcasts.
Doctors entered the drugs debate yesterday after the Lord
Mayor of Melbourne, Cr Ivan Deveson, called for a proposed
trial of legal heroin.
Melbourne City Council will debate the contentious question of
safe injecting rooms for heroin addicts in August.
Other doctors' groups yesterday supported calls for more debate
on how to battle the drugs problem.
Dr Bill Pring, the Victorian chairman of the Royal Australian and
New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, said: "The more
community debate the better. And that should include
harm-minimisation strategies as well as more curative strategies."
The Victorian chairman of the Royal Australian College of
General Practitioners, Dr Chris Hogan, said: "There should be
active investigation of all means of reducing the drug menace."