The Victorian government’s decision to trial a supervised, safe injecting space for heroin users in inner Melbourne will save lives by preventing overdoses and by putting many addicts on a pathway to recovery. It is a welcome, though lamentably belated, reversal of a policy that has contributed to dozens of needless deaths this year alone in Richmond, where the trial…

“There can be no rehabilitation if you are dead. If you are lying in a laneway in a gutter with a syringe that you got through the needle and syringe exchange program just here, there can be no pathway to treatment for you,” Mr Andrews said. […]

Victoria will trial a safe drug-injecting room in inner Melbourne in a major turnaround for Premier Daniel Andrews, after calls to set up the centre amid a growing heroin crisis in the state. Minister for Mental Health Martin Foley said Cabinet approved the proposal after a review of private members bill and after considering advice from the police, the coroner…

Expectations are growing that a reversal of Labor’s rejection of a safe injecting room in Richmond might be announced any day, with senior ministers who are in favour of the idea growing in confidence. Government sources say emergency and health services have already recorded the number of lives lost to drugs in the council area so far in 2017 at 34 “and climbing”. […]

The ABC understands the high death rate is placing enormous pressure on the top levels of Government to change its position — with a potential trial of an injecting room under active consideration. […]

A tenet of his opposition to testing pills at music festivals seems to be that the information provided to people about their drugs might not always be 100 per cent accurate. It is seemingly better to have no information if you can’t provide complete, perfectly accurate information all the time. In science, that would mean a return to the Dark…

Former police commissioner Karl O’Callaghan says decriminalisation of small quantities of certain illicit substances could be the answer to WA’s drug problem. Mr O’Callaghan made the remarks during his first segment as a social commentator on Gareth Parker’s 6PR Morning Program, during which he also said the City of Perth needed a new substantive Lord Mayor and confirmed he had…

While the Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy in the World in 2016, published on Oct. 16, noted that human rights violations such as extrajudicial killings and the climate of impunity were already present during previous administrations, “the killings in the ‘war on drugs’ as well as the possible reintroduction of the death penalty were the focus of the…

The government’s controversial plan to drug test welfare recipients is under fire yet again, with the United Nations’ rapporteur on human rights calling the policy a “cheap shot” that will “stigmatise” the country’s poorest and most vulnerable. […]

“It’s a setback, it’s a delay,” Harm Minimisation Australia President Gino Vumbaca tells AJP. “Canberra has a unique situation where some major areas of land are owned by the Federal Government by the National Capital Authority, which is not an independent authority. “My understanding is that the promoter was put under enormous pressure, he hadn’t had the festival – which was…