Dr Marianne Jauncey, the Medical Director of the Kings Cross Medically Supervised Injecting Centre, speaks with Rosie Ryan, Secretary of the NSW Left.
They spoke the same day as the Minns Government called a date for the NSW Drug Summit
Rosie: Marianne can you tell me about how the medically supervised injecting centre came to be?
Dr Jauncey: It all began in the late 1990s when heroin use was going up and heroin overdose numbers were also going up. Bob Carr, in quite a political masterstroke of the time, called a drug summit. It really was a seismic event for NSW drug policy.
I remember we had Ministers and MPs coming through Kings Cross and for many of them was the very first time they’d spoken to somebody who injected drugs, visited a treatment centre or spoken to family members.
There was more than one person that got up at the end of the summit and said this is the speech that I thought I would be giving, and then ripped up the pieces of paper they had in their hands, to show that where they thought they’d be at the beginning of the summit was not where they ended up.
Rosie: That’s such a rare thing in politics.
Dr Jauncey: Really rare. And people cried, there was real emotion, people were allowed to see and feel the raw humanity of the situation.
Those that shared their stories about using heroin played a crucial role, but it came at a huge personal cost for some, because of the stigma.
Something that I think we really need to keep in mind with this summit is that we have to make it a safe space.
Rosie: I only learnt for the first time today that the police were allies in getting reform, that really surprises me.
Dr Jauncey: And the reason is because their officers were the ones that were finding cold blue bodies in public toilets, hiding in a stairwell, hiding behind a tree, or a park bench, or between two parked cars, having to notify the next of kin.
I think we forget that. That’s the reality of being at the front lines in an epidemic of public drug injecting and public drug overdose, is that it’s not just the family dealing with the trauma of it – other people also have to pick up the pieces, and a lot of the time it was the police.
Rosie: Marianne, it’s obviously many years later but have there been any other centres like yours in NSW?
Dr Jauncey: No. So we operated as a trial for a decade. As far as I’m aware, that’s the longest running trial of any health intervention in the world.
Have a guess, how many clean syringes do we give out in New South Wales every year? Do you have any idea, Rosie? 15 million. Just in New South Wales. Through what’s called primary and secondary needle syringe programs.
We have the lowest rate of HIV amongst the population of people who inject drugs basically anywhere in the world. That is purely and simply because we were pragmatic in the 80s and introduced in a bipartisan manner a program of harm reduction within an overarching framework of harm minimisation.
Rosie: That is such a huge public health impact for everyone.
Dr Jauncey: And yet, in every pharmacy, in every building, in every hospital, in every service where we provide clean injecting equipment except at 666 Darlinghurst Road, people are provided with clean injecting equipment and then they are forced to go away.
They are turned away, away from care, away from supervision, away from anybody that is able to immediately recognise and respond to an overdose. Why? because the law demands that.
The law doesn’t match reality. And people are dying as a result.
Rosie: Do you have hopes for this upcoming summit that there could be a creation of more medically supervised injecting centres?
Dr Jauncey: More than hope. I... There has to be. It’s unfathomable to imagine anything other than that.
We’ve had 11,500 overdoses on site and not a single death. Because if you recognise what you are doing and you know how to respond, you can absolutely prevent someone dying.
Rosie: What made the original drug summit have such an impact?
Dr Jauncey: There was a commitment from the government to genuinely doing what the summit recommended. And there was new money.
Very different to the alcohol summit that happened some years later, or the Ice Inquiry. So many recommendations have been ignored.
If you’re going to go to the effort and expense of calling a summit, then as a government, it’s beholden on you to listen and act on the advice that comes out of it.
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