18 June 2020
DFA Brief to Parliamentarians – $6 million spent to save only one life
Our Vision: To support and educate young people, their families and communities to prevent the damage caused by drugs
INJECTING ROOM – ONLY ONE LIFE SAVED IN 18 MONTHS
The recently released review of the North Richmond Medically Supervised Injecting Room (MSIR) claims that the facility has saved 21-27 lives in its first 18 months of operation, but the claim is falsified by actual increases in opiate deaths in the vicinity of the injecting room, along with increased deaths across the top Local Government Areas for opiate deaths in Melbourne.
Drug Free Australia notes that there is very well established data from Australia’s most prominent illicit drug researchers indicating that one in every 100 dependent opiate users will die each year of an overdose. With dependent heroin users injecting at least three times a day (see p 58), there is, in Australia, one death for every 109,500 injections (three injections per user per day x 365 days in a year x 100 users for one fatality in that 109,500 total).
Yet over its first 18 months, the MSIR hosted only 112,831 opiate injections in 18 months, which is close to the 109,500 injections causing a fatality anywhere in Australia. What this means is that the MSIR is not capable of even saving one life per year for its $4 million per year of funding from the Victorian Government.
Claims in the MSIR review of 21-27 lives saved are clearly false. In the year before the July 2018 opening of the MSIR, there were 12 deaths within 1 kilometre of the MSIR, while in its first year of operation there were 13 deaths. In the top 5 LGA’s for drug deaths in Melbourne – Yarra, Brimbank, Melbourne, Port Phillip and Greater Dandenong – there were 65 opiate deaths in 2017/18, but 67 in the year after the MSIR opened (all mortality figures contained in the MSIR review). This is precisely the same scenario as with the Kings Cross injecting room, which showed no impact whatsoever on community-level deaths. The Sydney facility had only 55,000 opiate injections, which likewise made it incapable of saving even one life per year, rather taking two years to do so at a cost of $3 million per annum.
Drug Free Australia notes the problems with the reviewers’ manipulative estimates – the researchers have clearly calculated their ‘lives saved’ estimates from the immense number of overdoses in the MSIR, which are a full 100 times greater** than anywhere on the streets of Australia. We would simply ask Parliamentarians to ask any Science 101 lecturer anywhere in this country whether you can make reliable estimates on lives saved without first comparing overdose rates in the facility with rates of overdose on the streets – particularly when clients of the facility only average 2 in every 60 injections per month in the MSIR and 58 of 60 injections per month on the street. This makes the review’s estimates either fraudulent or inept, and the mortality data from North Richmond and the various Melbourne LGAs prove it so.
Look for Drug Free Australia’s next media Brief on how the Melbourne MSIR has driven up crime, public injecting and discarded needles in the North Richmond area.
** The review records 2,657 overdoses in 18 months for less than 113,000 opiate injections in the MSIR. There has been a lot of research on overdose within this country indicating that for every 109,500 opiate injections we can expect 24 non-fatal overdoses and one fatal one, a statistic that was a centrepiece of the Kings Cross injecting room’s first review (see p 59). There should have been around 26 overdoses per 113,000 injections rather than 2,657.
Media Contact
Drug Free Research Director
Contact: Gary Christian –0422 163 141, (02) 4362 9839