Formal injecting rooms should be among more innovative measures explored to minimise chaotic street drug use, the director of the largest voluntary drug treatment centre has said.
Mr Tony Geoghegan, director of the Merchants Quay Project in Dublin, said he was not at all surprised by the images of drug-users openly self-injecting in Dublin's city centre, published in yesterday's Irish Independent.
"And I don't think anyone working in this area would be surprised. The pictures highlight what we all know - that there is an enormous, and in many addicts' cases, chaotic heroin problem out there.
"For many homeless drug addicts there's a drug cycle. They use drugs to cope with their homelessness and they can't get into accommodation because they're using drugs, which makes it much more difficult for them to stabilise their drug use and eventually become drug-free."
If the State was serious about tackling chaotic intravenous drug use, far more innovative approaches would have to be explored to engage these addicts into treatment.
"People think when we talk about services for drug users, like day centres or formal injecting rooms, that we are condoning drug use," Mr Geoghegan said.
" But it has to be seen in the context of a continuum of care. These might be places where people could go and inject in a controlled environment and then hopefully move into stabilisation programmes, where eventually they can become drug-free."
Such "formal injecting rooms" have been used successfully in Australia, Switzerland, Britain and Sweden. Merchant's Quay was examining opening a facility along these lines, though there were planning problems.
Meanwhile, the Minister for Justice, Mr McDowell, has requested a report on the incident published yesterday from the Assistant Garda Commissioner, Mr Noel Conroy. Using illegal drugs in public is an indictable offence.
Supt John Farrelly, a Garda spokesman, complained that the series of photographs showed two sets of drug addicts at different times, rather than one group which was not moved on for 2½ hours.
He said it was not clear that the gardaí near the addicts had seen them injecting.
The Garda approach to known homeless drug-users was to police them "humanely". Addicts in breach of the law were brought to justice, he said, but they were victims, too.
