INJECTING ROOM TURNS TWENTY Australia’s first medically supervised injecting centre is still going strong despite the pressures of gentrification, reports John Moyle. wenty years ago, Australia’s first medicallysupervised injecting centre (MSIC) opened in Kings Cross. At the time, it was one of around 40 worldwide — and the first in the English-speaking world. Today, as the centre celebrates 20 years of continued operations without
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losing a single client, there are calls by some in the rapidly gentrifying community of Kings Cross/Potts Point to see it either closed or relocated. That is unlikely to happen as the centre’s operators, Uniting, own the building in Darlinghurst Road, and a 2016 NSW Health and the Department of Justice report concluded that “based on the evidence of significant ongoing need in Kings Cross, the current location of the service is appropriate”. Speaking to the Sydney Sentinel, Dr Marianne Jauncey, medical director, Uniting Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, says the fact the centre still exists is a significant achievement in itself. “The most obvious success is that we are still here after 20 years of
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service, and it’s not like we haven’t had a few things thrown at us, whether it was the media, politics or the pandemic,” Dr Jauncey said. After many years of lacklustre debate by NSW politicians, police and religious leaders on how to address the growing heroin epidemic in Sydney, and particularly in Kings Cross, it took a personal drug tragedy in the life of former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr — whose younger brother Greg died after a heroin overdose — to force the issue. Carr oversaw the 1999 Drug Summit, which paved the way for the centre to open for trials in 2001. For Kings Cross, this happened against the background of ambulance calls for overdoses every 12 hours and
