Victoria’s safe injecting room to become permanent, says premier | 9 News Australia

Good evening, in a

rare slip of the tongue

Daniel Andrews has confirmed

a building has been purchased to house

a drug injecting room in the city

despite community concern

the original one next to a school in

North Richmond will become permanent

Mark Santomartino reports

After 300,00 injections and almost

6000 overdoses , no one has died

inside the walls of North Richmond's

injecting room

There are 63 people who are with us that wouldn't be

and that to me says that this

has been a success

Daniel Andrews is asking

parliament to expand the program

and make it's location between

Richmond West Primary and

a maternal health clinic

permanent this week

After a five year trial summed up in this new report

across the City of Yarra there have been 50

heroin involved fatal overdoses

in the 42 months between the injecting room

opening and December 2021

compared to 68 deaths in the previous 42 months

Anyone with half a brain

would think that this is not appropriate next to a

primary school, let alone

five thousand vulnerable residents

Oliver Hagen has run the butcher across the road for

more than a decade

We have seen it improve

there is still a large amount of violence

around the area

and the number of needles discarded on

surrounding streets has more than doubled

with council now collecting

between 12 and 18 thousand every month

Now if we've got more needles on the streets

we've got more people not

using the injecting room

and actually coming to the region

injecting drugs that's of course

a massive issue

It is 100 times worse than it ever was

Improving neighbourhood amenity is a goal

of the injecting room but

the review panel found the trial has

not achieved this key objective.

This was not about amenity

mate, this is about saving lives

Daniel Andrews rejecting a recommendation

to allow couples, those on bail and

pregnant women to use North Richmond's

facility.

You are going to push them into the alley ways

if you don't reach out and help them

Long time Nine news reported Laura Turner

campaigned for the injecting room

after her sister Sky died of a heroin overdose in 2017

If I had it my way, we would have them all over

Victoria, there would be one in

Dandenong, there would be one in Footscray

there would be one in the CBD

and it sounds like the premier has one location in mind

We have bought a building

we think there is a strong case to have

a second injecting facility however

it's got to be at the right location

Let's go live to Mark who is outside that

mystery building

Mark, which one is it?

It is the old Yooralla building behind me Pete, right

next to Grave street

That is the building

it was put on the market back in 2020.

for a little more than 40 million dollars,

the government snapped it up at that time

and has since spent years

denying that it bought it to be

the home of a second supervised injecting room

Daniel Andrews was pretty quick to back

pedal on his comments today

insisting that the state buys

plenty of buildings

As for where a second supervised

injecting room will go

whether the city gets one at all

it will be influenced by a now

long overdue report

former Chief commissioner Ken Lay

was supposed to deliver his recommendations

in 2020, we are now hoping to get those

by the middle of this year, Pete.

Ok thank you Mark Santamartino