Reverends from city churches in Melbourne say they were driven by their Christian faith to throw their support behind a safe injecting room in the CBD in a joint letter to Premier Jacinta Allan.
The government has resisted pressure to immediately release an independent report from former police commissioner Ken Lay into a second possible, butin the City of Melbourne have escalated in the years since and reached 24 in 2022 – the highest in a decade – overtaking all other local government areas.he had seen a worsening crisis on the doorstep of his Collins Place church and in the back alleyway Baptist Place.
“What does our faith mean, here and now in this place, in the Paris end of Collins Street, where not everyone is living a Paris lifestyle?” Two coroners on Thursday recommended the government trial pill testing after investigating unrelated overdose deaths. Five coronial inquiries since 2021 have called on the state to introduce a drug-checking service, but health authorities did not support the recommendations.As leaders of churches in Melbourne’s CBD, we call upon you, the Premier of Victoria, and your colleague, the Victorian Minister for Mental Health, Ingrid Stitt, to honour your government’s commitment to establish a medically supervised injecting service here in the heart of the city. The need is urgent.
Supervised injecting rooms, or overdose prevention services, recognise the complex societal factors that contribute to addition, including poverty, trauma and mental illness. These services recognise that some individuals may continue to use drugs despite efforts to discourage them. Drug use is often a response to trauma and abuse, sometimes at the hands of people who are meant to care for them. Some people may recover and then relapse many times over.