Sydney's drug injecting room opens

The safe injecting room aims to get heroin addicts into a safer environment

In this story: Trial a 'sad day' Overdose deaths reduced RELATED STORIES, SITES

SYDNEY, Australia -- Australia's first legal heroin injecting room is now open for business, after operating for about four hours on Sunday night.

Located in Sydney's seedy Kings Cross district, the controversial facility has been set up by the Uniting Church, which sees the medically supervised center as a way to cut deaths by drug overdose.

The center also provides counseling services for addicts and private security firm has been hired to protect users when they enter and leave the facility.

The injecting room can host up 16 people at a time and allow for 200 injections a day in two four-hour sessions.

Officials say the room will open again at noon local time Monday.

The center will operate for the next 18 months and was set up as a result of a New South Wales Government sponsored summit between community leaders, politicians, medical experts and police to find solutions to the growing social problems of drug abuse in Australia.

However, critics of the experiment, who include conservative Australian Prime Minister John Howard, say the center condones the drug problem rather than fighting it.

Trial a 'sad day'

State Opposition leader and fellow Liberal Party member Kerry Chikarovski Monday labeled the opening of the room a sad day for Sydney.

"I've said all along that personally I believe the money that's been involved in that project would be better spent on rehabilitation, getting people off drugs rather than helping them continue with their addiction," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The Uniting Church's Reverend Harry Herbert, the drug project's executive director, told CNN the church did not condone or encourage drug use but as it was going to happen anyway, it was better done in the center, "than in the seedy alleys of [Kings] Cross".

Overdose deaths reduced

Herbert said overseas experience had shown that injecting centers had cut the number of drug overdose deaths.

Australia's National Drug and Alcohol Research center figures show 958 people died of opiate drug overdoses in 1999, of which 401 occurred in the state of New South Wales.

Overdoses were the cause of about one in every eight deaths of Australians aged between 15 and 24.

It is estimated there are 74,000 heroin addicts in Australia and up to 300,000 casual users - about twice the number of 10 years ago.

Police officers in King's Cross said they had not received any reports of drug overdoses since the center opened and no-one had been charged with any drug offences in the King's Cross area.

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National Drug and Alcohol research Center

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