Safe injecting room in Melbourne’s CBD rejected by Victorian government

Victorian premier Jacinta Allan has announced new funding for drug services after scrapping a proposal to open a second injecting room in Melbourne’s CBD. Photograph: Joel Carrett/AAP

A proposed safe injecting room to be based in Melbourne’s CBD has been rejected by the Victorian government, which claimed it could not find an appropriate location for it.

The government on Tuesday announced that a new trial facility – which would complement the existing safe injecting room in nearby North Richmond – will not proceed after concluding there was no site that balanced the needs of drug users with the broader community.

A $95.11m “statewide action plan” to tackle drug overdoses has instead been announced.

It came as the government released a long-awaited report, commissioned in 2020, into a potential safe injecting room for the city. The then-premier, Daniel Andrews, had said the facility would help reduce heroin-related overdoses in the city and ease the pressure off its North Richmond service.

Written by former Victorian police commissioner, Ken Lay, the report recommends a trial of a “small and discrete service” consisting of four to six booths, combined with wraparound support for drug users.

Between November 2020 and May 2021, Lay identified four areas of injecting drug harms in the CBD with the highest ambulance attendances for heroin overdoses, with the “most significant” located near the intersection of Elizabeth Street and Flinders Street.

From an initial list of 50 sites, he narrowed down a shortlist of the three sites for the government: 104 A’Beckett Street, 340 Flinders Street and 244 Flinders Street.

The proposal was significantly smaller than the 20-booth facility at North Richmond, in recognition of the “safety and amenity concerns” of the local community and traders.

According to coroner’s court data, 549 Victorians died from drug overdoses in 2022, with 230 involving heroin.

Instead of opening a new facility, the premier, Jacinta Allan, and the mental health minister, Ingrid Stitt, said a new $95.11m plan would “save lives, reduce harms, and give more people the care they need – in the CBD and across Victoria”.

The plan will include $36.4m to establish a dedicated CBD community health hub to open at 244 Flinders Street, which will offer a two-year $7.2m trial of hydromorphone treatment. The trial will help 60 heroin users for whom methadone and buprenorphine have been ineffective.

An additional $9.4m will be spent to establish wraparound health and social supports, which will be located at that site as well as the Salvation Army’s CBD headquarters.

Community health provider, cohealth, will also be given $21.3m for more outreach teams in the CBD. About $8.4m will be spent on pharmacotherapy treatments in “up to 30 locations”, while a $4.4m trial of 20 Naloxone dispensing machines will be rolled out.

The government has also committed to developing an alcohol and drug strategy, which the sector has been calling for several years.

Lay’s report details the changes of the scope of his work throughout the pandemic.

He said that in mid-2020, he was initially tasked with investigating whether a site at 53 Victoria Street, near Queen Victoria Market, would be feasible as a safe injecting room site.

Lay determined it was “not located in a concentrated drug market” and “an alternative site closer to higher drug activity could be considered”.

He did not nominate a preferred site, but said 244 Flinders Street – the former Yooralla building – “ranked highest”. It was bought by the government.

In 2022, he was asked by the health minister to conduct further consultation into “issues around the potential establishment of an injecting service in the City of Melbourne” and whether there were “any pandemic-related implications in establishing such as service”.

He found drug-related harms had “returned to pre-Covid levels and in some cases are now even higher”, with the intersection of Flinders and Elizabeth Street accounting for 20% of heroin-related ambulance attendances.

Lay recommended establishing an interagency committee – consisting of the health department, City of Melbourne, Victoria Police, Ambulance Victoria and the government’s preferred service provider – to oversee an injecting room trial.