Drug Experts Want To Open A Safe Place In Sydney For Ice Addicts To Smoke

Two drug experts are looking at establishing a room in Sydney for people with ice addictions to come and smoke in, for their own safety and for the safety of the community.

Drug expert Dr Alex Wodak and author Matt Noffs, who wrote “Breaking The Ice” about how Australia can try tackle its ice problem, spoke to “7.30” about their plans move Australia’s response to addiction out of the 1980s:
“There’s been over 130 studies into the effectiveness of drug consumption rooms and of those, they have found they reduce violence, they reduce crime, they reduce overdoses. 

“In fact there’s never been a single overdose in any drug consumption room around the world.”

Noffs and Wodak plan to open the room in Liverpool, but the president of the Liverpool Chamber Of Commerce isn’t all that chuffed with the idea:

“Having an ice room in Liverpool is going to project the image of Liverpool as the drug capital of south-west Sydney, we don’t want that image.”

The NSW Government has stated that they will not support the idea but Noffs and Wodak say they plan to go ahead with it regardless.

Former AFP commissioner Mick Palmer reckons it’s a pretty good idea and reckons other cops might feel the same:

“There’s a wide recognition among law enforcement colleagues, including young officers as well as more experienced ones, that the current arrangements we have in place aren’t achieving the outcomes we would like to achieve, that in many ways it is badly broken.

“We have to be prepared to look at new ways of doing business.”

Hopefully they can get this off the ground, help some people, and not at all get arrested in the process.

Source: ABC.
Photo: YouTube / Gastro.

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