Residents defend Melbourne injecting room
Friday, 4 July 2025
Pro-MSIR rally. Photo Credit: Herschel Landes of Richmond via Facebook.
The Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Sydney opened in May 2001. It was nearly 10 years before its trail status was removed. When the Victorian Government announced it was opening the Medically Supervised Injecting Room (MSIR) in North Richmond, Inner City Melbourne, harm reduction advocates thought we had turned a corner and finally the Australian governments were going to adopt evidence-based policies and strategies on a permanent not trial basis. But they remain the only 2 safe injecting facilities in Australia.
MSIR was opened for a 2-year trial in 2018, which was extended for another 3 years before the Victorian government legislated to make the facility permanent in 2023. On April 27, there were 2 protests of about the same size around the MSIR. One protest was calling for its removal, the other supporting it and recognising that people who inject drugs are part of the community.
Brit Chapman from Harm Reduction Victoria was one of the organisers of the protest supporting the service. “It was in response to this other rally that was called that day by some residents and some business owners who are opposed to the injecting room. But we decided to protest because we’re in favour of the injecting room. We think it’s a good idea,” she told Users News. “We wanted to let the community know that the haters aren’t the only voices that are there and that there are residents who support the service. We wanted them to be able to get up and speak to their experiences and share their opinions.”
Media attacks
The competing protests followed a number of inflammatory articles in the Herald-Sun, Melbourne’s Murdoch tabloid, including an opinion piece by Yarra Mayor Stephen Jolly, who spoke at the anti-MSIR rally. Victorian Liberal opposition leader Brad Battin also spoke at the rally, which was also supported by the Victoria St Business Association and billed itself as “Make Our Streets Safe”.
The facility has been a favourite target of the Murdoch media, who have blamed it for all sorts of social problems — from property crime to the local economy — while stigmatising people who inject drugs and other marginalised groups. These claims provided the substance of material promoting the anti-MSIR protest.
“The medical supervised injecting room has saved hundreds of lives and prevented over 6000 overdoses — that was a 2023 figure, so they’d be many more since then. It’s provided pathways for better health for thousands and thousands more people,” Gabrielle de Vietri, Greens State MP for Richmond and former Yarra Mayor told Users News.
Under the leadership of the Greens, the Yarra Council had supported the facility. However, in 2024 control of the council was won by “Yarra for All” a team of independents who played a significant role promoting the anti-MSIR protest.
“On previous Greens-led councils, we have always been very vocal in our support,” de Vietri said. “It was really disappointing to see the new mayor of this city, Stephen Jolly, charge in and stoke the flames from a comment that he made at the very beginning of his term vilifying drug users and creating division and tension in the community that had recently settled since the facility became permanent.”
Chapman described the messaging of the anti-MSIR protesters as unclear. “It’s a lot of the same voices that have been in opposition to the service since it opened and have historically been calling for it to be shut down. But now they’re saying that they support saving lives and don’t want to close the MSIR but want our streets safe because they care about community. I guess the implication is that people who use the MSIR are unsafe to be around. But we’re kind of unclear. If they’re not calling for it to be shut down, what are they calling for exactly? Are they just protesting the existence of people who use drugs? We’re not really sure,” she said.
Anti-MSIR rally. Photo Credit: Herschel Landes of Richmond via Facebook.
Move or close?
The opponents of the facility have suggested St Vincents Hospital in Fitzroy as an alternative location, although the administration of that hospital have already ruled that option out.
“They’re calling effectively for it to be shut down,” de Vietri said. “They say they just want it moved, that’s it’s just not in the right location, but we know that the State government has backflipped on its promise to open up any more supervised injecting facilities. We know that their suggestion to move it to a hospital 2 suburbs away is going to have disastrous impacts on the community in North Richmond, and on the community of people who use injecting drugs.”
Like de Vietri, Jolly also criticises the State government for not following through with an earlier pledge to open more injecting rooms. He had actually been a supporter of the North Richmond safe injecting facility before it was established. He claims to support the rights of people who inject drugs. However, the protest he endorsed calls for the existing centre to be closed before the question of new facilities is addressed. Speakers and placards at the anti-MSIR protest focussed on closing MSIR and portrayed the existence of drug users as the problem.
De Vietri pointed to Jolly’s “horrendous framing of the issue” and referred to a February 27 interview in which he said: “It’s a Disneyland for drug users. You can get there by train or tram, there’s plenty of people that will sell you the drugs, there’s plenty of nice houses in Abbotsford and North Richmond you can rob to get the money for the drugs, and there’s even a supervised injecting facility that you can shoot up in.”
“If that’s not demonising people who use injecting drugs, and if that’s not suggesting that it’s the supervised injecting room that’s at the core of the problem, then I don’t know what he was saying,” de Vietri said. “I think it’s really irresponsible and it’s not solution focussed at all.”
Jolly continually returns to these themes. In his Herald Sun opinion article he described North Richmond as a “Disneyland for those addicted to ice and heroin.”
Crime
Chapman objected to the conflation of drug use and other crime.
“He was talking about the crime statistics and how Richmond has had an increase in crime in the last few years, I guess insinuating that this was a direct result of the injecting room attracting criminals to the area. What he didn’t do was contextualise those statistics,” Chapman said. “If you look at the crime statistics for the rest of the State, crime is up all over Victoria and, compared to other local government areas, Richmond has actually seen a much smaller increase in crime. So what he’s saying isn’t exactly truthful.”
She referred to a point raised by a speaker at the pro-MSIR rally. “Richmond is the suburb with the highest number of pubs of all the inner-city suburbs. The speaker said it’s not uncommon for her to see drunk men pissing in the street that she lives on every weekend. Quite often it’s pissed men at nighttime who are making the streets unsafe, rather than people who inject drugs who generally aren’t around the streets in the evenings.”
De Vietri concurred, “I think there’s been an increase across the State. The stats show that. But I think that’s reflective of the fact that so many people are struggling right now. They’re struggling with housing, struggling with the cost of living, struggling with accessing health care that they need.”
People coming in from outside the area
The idea that the safe injecting facility was a “honeypot” attracting criminal drug users from far and wide was another recuring trope from Jolly and the MSIR opponents. “In truth, drug use in the area long preceded the establishment of the facility. I lived just 100 meters from where it is now before the facility was built, and I can tell you that people have been injecting drugs and dealing in the area for a very long time. So, it has been established where it was needed,” de Vietri said.
“That area of Richmond has had a very open drug market for more than half a century. It’s always been there,” Chapman said. “Statistically, when they’ve done studies about who’s using the room, it looks like around 50% of the people who use the service live in Richmond. They live in the direct area. Almost all of the other 50% live within a few kilometres radius, and were already coming to Richmond to score their drugs and would usually use in the area.”
Businesses closing down
Another recurring trope from the safe injecting room’s opponents is that the facility and its clients are responsible for small businesses failing. As Jolly said in an interview about MSIR: “There used to be 60-odd restaurants in Victoria Street, now there’s around 30. There used to be five butchers, now there’s one. There used to be two fishmongers, now there’s one. It’s a real crisis.”
Chapman explained: “The most marginalised members of the community are being scapegoated for the lack of trade on Victoria Street, which is due to the vagaries of capitalism. The first person who spoke at our rally pointed out that shops have been closing up for about 10 years, a few years longer than the injecting room has been open. She said it was already happening, and when Covid came that made everything worse. Also, because Richmond is an inner-city suburb, it’s gentrifying quite a lot. The council rates and that sort of thing are becoming really unaffordable. That’s probably more the reason that businesses can’t say open.”
Inside Small Business reported in March that approximately 17% of businesses operating in Australia at the start of 2024 had closed down by the end of the year. Data & Research expert Peter Drennan said, “Rising costs of living, higher interest rates on commercial loans and mortgages, and economic uncertainty are making it harder for businesses to survive.”
Public space
The media campaign against MSIR has relied heavily on pictures that push a stigmatising stereotype of injecting drug users. Some of the pictures show people injecting in public or semi-public spaces. This ignores the fact that MSIR was established in the first place so that people didn’t need to inject drugs in public spaces and if people still are, it is not due to people using the facility but to people not using it. Likewise with used injecting equipment ending up as litter, another issue that the anti-MSIR opponents have focussed on.
Chapman says that street using has actually declined since the centre opened. “Quite a few of the residents who were with us doing the counter-protest said that there has been a notable change since the injecting room opened: there is much less injecting on the street. A resident who has lived in the area since 1977 when she was a child said it’s noticeably much better in respect of public injecting. She lives literally just a 30 second walk from the facility. That’s also my experience. I moved to Melbourne about 20 years ago. I remember going down to Richmond then and you’d see it down every alley way. It’s really rare to see it today. And that’s what a lot of the residents are saying. Of course it’s still happening, but much less. Ambulance Victoria’s data for ambulance call outs shows there’s much less overdose incidents than what there was.”
Bigger picture
Both De Vietri and Chapman put the issues of “anti-social behaviour” animating the campaign against the injecting facility in a broader context.
“There is so much more to do reduce the harm of drug use in the area but also to support people who are really struggling at the moment. To support people who are struggling with homelessness; to support people struggling with the rising cost of everything; and to support people with mental health services and drug and alcohol rehabilitation,” de Vietri said. “The safe injecting room was only ever meant to be one part of the solution, and it’s doing what it’s meant to do. It’s saving lives, it’s taking pressure off the emergency wards and the ambulance system. But the outreach and wrap-around services around the facility have never fully been funded by the State government, who have backflipped on their promise to open more.”
“HR Vic’s standpoint, echoed by many of the residents, is that the problems that people are experiencing to do with drug use are the result of War on Drugs and prohibition, and the criminalisation and stigmatisation of people,” Chapman said. “If there is public injecting happening in Richmond and syringe litter on the street that makes me think: why are people feeling they can’t use the injecting room? Are there other structural or systemic issues going on that is stopping people from using the service?”
She said there were barriers to some community members accessing the service. “Assisted injecting isn’t allowed in the service. So if you’re not able to inject yourself, then you can’t use the service. You have to use elsewhere. And if you don’t have a safe home to use in, or if you’ve had to travel to Richmond because that’s where you score your drugs from, of course you’re going to use on the street or wherever you can find a little bit of privacy in a car park or wherever. The hours have been cut and they’ve also got stricter. It’s much easier to get banned from the space for a period of time now. And just recently they’ve started banning people for life, which never happened before. So there are ways that the service is managed that could be improved, if it were given more funding. If the government funded it properly it would be able to do a better job of dealing with some of the issues.”
Police
Increased policing was a demand raised by many anti-MSIR campaigners. Jolly claimed in his Herald-Sun article that police presence in the area had been cut and called for this to be reversed. Chapman and de Vietri were both sceptical about this proposed solution.
Chapman said, “I think it would have a negative impact if there were more cops in the area. Already, a lot of people who use that service feel like they’re targeted by the police when they’re on their way to it. The police are supposed to let people get to where they’re going, they’re not supposed to search people or confiscate their drugs in the vicinity of the injecting room. But what is regarded as ‘in the vicinity’ is very much up to the individual cops but there are occasions of police coming in from other suburbs to just sort of like check it out — and to harass people. I don’t know how often that happens but there’s definitely anecdotal reports of that happening. Something else is that the police were granted new powers here in Victoria, which give them the ability to decide that an area is a ‘designated area’ and they don’t have to provide a reason. Then they are allowed to stop and search anybody they want to without needing a reason. It’s something to do with weapons control.”
“Criminalising people who use drugs doesn’t address the long-term health needs of those people or of the community,” de Vietri said. “We can’t just funnel money into punishing people who may have fallen through the cracks that the government has created in terms of housing, mental health and the social connection and support services that they need. It just doesn’t seem to be the solution here. It’s really dangerous and superficial to think that more police and criminalising visible drug use will lead to better community safety. We know that when we criminalise people for using drugs, it doesn’t lead to better outcomes.”
Cuts
“I think people do conflate visible drug use, homelessness and crime,” de Vietri said, and pointed out that both the State government and local council had cut funding to services that were providing programs that mitigated harm related to, or incorrectly attributed to, drug use.
“In December, the Labor government pulled funding for the Youth Support and Advocacy Service (which is just down the road from the supervised injecting room) that provides critical health and drug rehabilitation support for young people,” she said. “They had to let go of 11 staff and pull back their services for 330 vulnerable young people in the area. And before the rally, the Yarra Mayor, supported by the Deputy Mayor and his bunch of independent conservative councillors defunded the Yarra Drug and Health Forum. That had been established specifically to reduce the harm of drug use in this community and to coordinate the response between, the health services, the police, the Council and the State government. So there’s been some very key services and wraparound support that has actually been wound back recently. That can all contribute to this sense of a loss of amenity and a loss of safety in the area.”
She believes that the solution lies in increasing rather than cutting social services. “We’ve got a government that instead of supporting people with rent controls and more public housing, are actually demolishing the public housing that we currently have. And they’re completely neglecting the existing homes that we have, making the thousands of people living in public housing feel like 2nd class citizens,” she said. “We’ve got a hospital system that is absolutely overwhelmed. We’ve got a mental health system that hardly anyone can afford to access. There’s a real trend here: increasing inequality and increasing poverty. More and more people falling through the cracks that the government has created through policies that focus on wealth generation for property developers and big corporations, rather than supporting people in need.”
Richmond is not a “disaster zone”
However, she also questioned the negativity that the opponents of the MSIR showed towards Richmond, which Jolly has described as a “ghetto” and a “disaster zone”. While there were serious issues with increasing cost of living, lack of housing and cuts to services and infrastructure, she listed numerous grassroots community initiatives that make Richmond the vibrant and diverse community that it is and suggested these indicated solutions to the problems being attributed to the presence of MSIR and its service users.
“There’s local solutions and there’s bigger solutions that a lot of people in the community are pushing for to try and shift the conversation away from this really damaging, harmful conversation that won’t lead to good outcomes to one where we’re actually tackling the root causes,” she said.
Chapman said, “The local residents who spoke at the [pro-MSIR] rally said that they were really proud of living in Richmond because of the injecting room being there. They were proud of being part of a community that was actively seeking solutions to problems, rather than just complaining and starting vitriol and hate against people who actually needed support.”