Drug comments misconstrued

In response to Richard van Wirdum, I must take issue with his misconstruing my comments about the drug trial.

At no stage did I state that injecting rooms would be safe.

No one in the medical profession or from the Government has used terms other than "medically supervised" to describe the injecting room at Kings Cross.

So that readers may understand, the term "safe injecting room" was coined by some participants in the Drug Summit, that was held in 1999, to denote that such a place would be a "safer" injecting place than a street or a toilet.

It is patently flawed to term the Kings Cross trial as anything other than medically supervised, which is the term I used.

The questions that Richard poses are valid and unfortunately a page of space really would not allow these issues to be adequately canvassed.

These questions will, no doubt, be addressed by government officials, during the conduct of the trial in Kings Cross.

The major point, that seems to be missed in this whole debate, is the need to examine and try to understand why people resort to such measures as drug use.

Unfortunately so many people in society seem to think that the answer is to lock up those who are seen as "drug addicts".

This is extremely popular but does not really solve anything other than removing illegal drug users from sight.

The fact is that people do take drugs, I wish that this was not the case, but unfortunately the overwhelming evidence is that some people will, the key is to try and lessen the number.

As I stated in relation to the drug issue: "It is not an easy problem to solve and people use all sorts of drugs in their daily lives, most particularly alcohol and tobacco but as these are legal society seems not to so much concentrate on these".

I went on to say that "Society has recognised addictions are health issues. The use of illicit drugs should be dealt with in the same manner. I would not advocate that policing for the distribution of illicit drugs should cease, far from it".

We should all remember that what is occurring is a trial.

The purpose of a trial is to observe and examine then see what can be learnt.

As I said previously "Maybe then we may find a solution so that we can have drug free lifestyles and a drug free community".

It is not going to be easy or be able to be solved with the wave of a magic wand and a few platitudes, but we must try otherwise the problem will just get worse and worse.

Craig Munnings, May 8