Noodles and/or Needles

Cameron Hurst investigates backlash against the injecting room in North Richmond.

A purple and gold arch presides over the choked highway intersection at the southern entrance to Victoria St, Richmond. Often, when gazing at this monolithic thing while waiting to cross at the lights, I feel that I am in the presence of some beautiful, strange, slightly battered anthropomorphic Wonder of the Modern World. The sculpture, welded c. 2014, is officially called the “Gateway to Victoria Street.” To me, from afar, it looks like a squat, glyphic person with arms raised and an eyeless, stretched-out crescent moon for a face. Actually, it’s meant to look like a boat, decorated with a pouch filled with one hundred eggs. The boat represents the passage of migration. The egg pouch comes from a Vietnamese creation myth that tells of a romance between a dragon king and a fairy princess. Here, on the corner of Hoddle and Vic, it serves as a welcome sign for people entering the area. For what? Well, it depends.

On a Sunday morning in late April, I passed by the Gateway on my way to investigate two rallies that were taking place simultaneously in North Richmond. One rally was advertised on posters stuck up all over a row of shuttered shops on Victoria Street. The posters featured a blocky, bright red headline that read “Make Our Streets Safe” and listed three demands: “safe for families,” “businesses back,” and “we want action!” Another version of the poster was in Vietnamese; the event was organised in part by members of the local Vietnamese diaspora, with the support of the Victoria St Business Association. The second rally had been organised as a counter-protest. Its poster, which was also stuck up around the area, read: “People who use drugs are welcome in our community/Stigma & scapegoating isn’t.” This rally had the support of, among others, Harm Reduction Victoria. There was one local issue central to both gatherings: the Lennox St Medically Supervised Safe Injecting Room, otherwise known as the MSIR.

The state’s first and only facility of its kind, the MSIR opened in July of 2018. It’s a place for people to intravenously inject drugs under the care of health professionals who can provide medical aid in the event of overdose. It’s also a hub for other kinds of services, like doctors appointments, housing organisations, and legal aid. The facility was the Andrews state government’s response to recommendations from a 2017 coronial inquest into a spate of heroin-related deaths, many of which happened on Victoria St and its surrounding laneways. This area has historically been and continues to be one of Melbourne's major drug markets. On any given day, you can see people conducting quick transactions by the tram stops and $2 shop pot plant and plastic slide shoe displays. It’s part of life here. The other day I saw a shark grey Tesla drive by Lennox St with the custom plate “DEALR”—of what, we can only imagine.

The facility entered a two-year trial period after opening. Then, in 2020, it underwent a review that recommended a further trial period, followed in 2023 by another review, which judged the service to be successful in fulfilling its main aim—saving lives. There had been over 6000 overdose events at the facility since it opened, with no deaths; modelling suggested the facility had prevented up to 63 fatalities. But the researchers also acknowledged that “public injecting, discarded needles and syringes, loud gatherings of people near the MSIR and erratic or violent behaviour make many residents and local business owners feel unsafe going about their daily lives.” Nevertheless, the final recommendation was that the government make the facility permanent and ongoing.

I go to Victoria St for pho pretty much weekly (I Love Pho). I’ve seen some deals go down and crossed the street a few times, but I’ve never felt seriously unsafe. Doesn’t living in a city require a certain level of acceptance of a wide variety of human behaviour? And besides, I thought, the people who oppose the injecting room are callous haters—selfish mortgagees, business owners, and Concerned Parents who put their own comfort before a life-saving service for extremely vulnerable, innocent, often traumatised people. At least, this was the narrative I’d superficially digested from the couple of articles I’d read about the MSIR over the years.

But I’m also aware that those who live and work in the area, and aren’t just tourists meandering down for delicious broth, have different experiences of the streets and the injecting room. I wanted to see who would actually show up at these two opposing grassroots rallies to try to understand what they were advocating for.

*

At 11am, I arrived at the “Make Our Streets Safe” rally. It was tucked in a laneway next to North Richmond railway station. There were about one hundred people there, with the majority over the age of fifty. A few police officers were stationed around. A water table had been set up under the fronds of a massive palm tree. At least five supersized Australian flags waved in the breeze, including one with its pole held erect by a man in chunky black-framed statement glasses, a herringbone newsboy cap, and a black pleather zip-up vest. Fitted. National pride was a theme; another guy nearby wore an Australian flag cap, as well as a t-shirt with one of the rally's main slogans, “Noodles not Needles.” Lots of people had hot pink “Noodles not Needles” signs and shirts. Catchy, but… por qué no los dos? I thought.

The Facebook page advertising the event implied that the organisers did not want to straight-up shut down the injecting room. They seemed to understand that this was a politically fraught and perhaps pragmatically difficult demand, as well as one that could be perceived as punching down. Instead, the focus was on investment, accountability, responsibility—“If you plant a tree, you have to look after it,” one poetic post put it. The other principal concern was the generally desirable but nebulous concept of “safe streets.”

The rally kicked off with some statesman-like oration from a grey-haired man in a suit and RayBans. “The Victorian government should hear our voice,” he said, raising his hand to a smattering of cheers. “It is time for the people to talk.” He called out the name of the first person scheduled to speak, who did not materialise. Neither did the second person. When someone did get on the mic, he had a very clear message, expressed first in Vietnamese and then in English—to ask the state government to get rid of the injecting room facility. “We have to be strong today. To show them that our opinion is that we need to remove it,” he said. “Thank you.” Tan Vo, the father from the I Love Pho family dynasty, banged a handheld red and gold drum vigorously in response.

Next, pollies from Yarra City Council got up to speak. Meca Ho, former restaurant owner and current Councillor for the Melba Ward (this area), was up first. “I’ve never said to shut down the injection room or been against medical safety,” he said. “But the people in our community feel unsafe.” He wanted to see more policing and more investment in the area. He also wanted the government to consider moving the injecting room facility up the road to St Vincent's Hospital. So too did Mayor Stephen Jolly, who, as his turn to speak came, concluded a hushed conference with a local on the sidelines and removed his aviators.

In elections held last November, the progressive Yarra Council had undergone a major shift in personnel. Jolly, a longtime councillor and self-identified Marxist, had led a motley crew called “Yarra for All” to victory on a bubblegum purple-toned platform which had focussed heavily on opposition to Greens-affiliated councillors. Now elected Mayor, Jolly had been characterising the new council lineup rather dramatically as the “regime change.” He was styling his mayorship as one that led a council of swift, common-sense action. Last week, for example, a new mural appeared in a Fitzroy laneway, depicting a strangely-proportioned woman clad in metallic red latex, bound with rope, and ball-gagged. The Council received a vomit of complaints. Jumping on ABC Radio, Jolly made assurances that the mural would go and the business that had allowed it to go up without a permit would be “dealt with in the normal way.” But getting bad Tumblr porn scrubbed from a laneway was an easy win. The politics of the injecting room were much more complicated.

Jolly stepped up to the mic. “Richmond is taking the load for all of Melbourne, and it’s not fair,” he said to the crowd. He has the remnants of an Irish brogue and a quick, forceful orating style. He told the rally that he supported the facility’s existence, but thought it was essential that the government build more facilities elsewhere in the city (another recommendation of the 2023 review). He made a point of emphasising his compassion for drug users, saying that he had many friends who'd died overdosing. However, in his view, the drug management industry had a vested interest in making money out of the current situation; whichever organisation wins the contract gets the government funding (people who work in the sector would probably strongly dispute any notion that community health services are flush with cash). He also had an expert-sceptic angle, saying that academics and the government weren't acknowledging the scale and seriousness of issues he saw as being directly connected to the local drug trade, such as violent, intimidating behaviour from some people hanging around the streets. “The status quo is not good enough, and we are fed up being gaslit by people that say there’s no problem down here.”

After Jolly, a few more speakers said their piece. As I listened, it became clear to me that for some, the MSIR has come to represent a quasi-demonic locus of the suburb’s every ill, symbolising government permissiveness, inaction, and abandonment. This sentiment may not have been evidence-based, but it did have support—and it was putting the injecting room and the people who used it at risk. One woman ranted about one of the more controversial aspects of the injecting room facility: its position right next to Richmond West Primary School. It really is right next to it. In purely PR terms, it must be said this is not ideal. The speaker railed against a series of unfortunate events at the school, including, she spat out dramatically, a time when a couple allegedly had “sex on the school grounds.” Whether the culprits were actually connected to the injecting room seemed irrelevant to her grievance.

The rally moved onto the tram tracks and began a lumbering march east. One lady hoisted a prop bag of rubbish over her shoulder, like a Neighbourhood Watch version of the Sad Ant meme. A guy who worked at a local phone repair shop told me that in his view Victoria St was the quietest and scariest that he'd ever seen it. The worst it’s ever been seemed to be a theme of this rally. He said that for the most part the Vietnamese community preferred to keep their heads down, but that it was just getting too much. Their livelihoods were at stake.

A glammed-up diva in Ugg boot stilettos and a “Noodles not Needles” shirt gallivanted out ahead of the pack, waving an Australian flag and live-streaming through her phone, occasionally moving up close to film the faces of elderly men in the crowd, who laughed bashfully. She took up a ringleader position, grinning and leading a chant of “Out! Out! Out!” When she paused for a moment to breathe on the edge of the crowd, I asked her why she was there. It turned out she wasn’t even a local—she lived in Footscray and had just showed up for an exciting Sunday activity with her friends. An hour or so later, post-rally, I saw her presiding like a visiting dignitary over a large table at the packed Pho Hung Vuong 2.

As the march paused at a new location down the road, the grifters in suits swaggered up to the mic: Anthony Koutoufides (former Carlton player, former city mayoral candidate, and now former Melbourne federal election candidate); Tim Smith (former Married At First Sight contestant and now former Melbourne federal election candidate); and Brad Battin (former cop, former Bakers Delight owner, and current state Liberal Party leader). They may as well have spoken in one voice, botched Greek chorus style: We will be tough on crime/ We will be tough on crime/ We are tough/ Tough/ Tough/ (Vote for us)/ (Vote for us)/ (Vote for us)/ (Please).

*

The counter-rally was underway nearby at a frankly quite decrepit and bird-shit-splattered pocket park on Lennox St. On Victoria St, a row of police were blocking the footpath to the park, deterring interactions between the two groups. This gathering was about a quarter of the size of the safe streets one, if that. The attendees were, for want of a better word, ACABier. There were piercings and hand-embroidered clothes. One person holding a sweet, brown-eyed dog on a leash repped what appeared to be faded t-shirt, worn as a skirt over jeans, printed with the words “junkies, speedfreaks, chugs, burnouts, dealers, boosters, crackheads, acid casualties & otherwise are SACRED.” Attendees held up signs that said “people who use drugs are part of the community” and “people who use drugs deserve healthcare too.”

Sadly, I missed the moment when Brad Battin turned up at this rally by accident. Apparently he only realised he was at the wrong rally when Fiona Patten (a popular local politician with a longstanding interest in drug law reform) asked him to speak. Cheeky Fiona! When I arrived, Karen Hovenga was on the mic. Hovenga is a sustainability consultant who ran unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Melba Ward at the council elections last year. She was wearing a shirt that looked like a licorice allsort and holding a pro-MSIR sign. Hovenga spoke about how those attacking the public housing tenants and the people who use the injecting room facility didn’t actually want to come up with serious proposals to help local residents. She wasn’t convinced that the situation was, in fact, the worst it’s ever been. “We’ve been talking about safety in the high-rise flats for the last 50 years,” she said to the crowd. A woman in a slouchy beanie and sunnies took the mic. She seemed moved by the show of support from the attendees. “It’s amazing you’re all here standing in solidarity with people who use drugs,” she said. “Because people who use drugs are shat on by the community.”

The crowd traipsed up the street to the MSIR. As we congregated outside the facility, a tense situation developed. The police asked for the details of a man who had been involved in some sort of altercation with a woman from the safe streets rally. She had pursued him down the road (no small feat considering that she was in flip-flops), and continued to shout at him over the shoulders of the cops who barred her way. She said he spat on her. He said she was being a racist and had abused him. Rally attendees gathered in a circle around the moustachioed cop taking the man’s details, filming with stony faces. It felt like violence could break out at any moment, but it never quite tipped over, and after a while, the group dissipated.

Later, I chatted with Brit Chapman, another of the rally’s speakers. Chapman works in the health promotion team in Harm Reduction Victoria. It’s a job that entails, among other things, acting as a mediator between the MSIR and the clients who use it; she understands the ins and outs of the facility intimately. Chapman thought some MSIR opponents had unrealistic expectations. “The MSIR was never supposed to be a silver bullet to solve all of the issues to do with public drug use in the area,” she told me. “And it never could be either.” There are so many other complex factors at play: poverty, the housing crisis, childhood traumas, adult traumas, systemic racism, mental illness. The pressures of capitalism in general. The potent social stigma experienced by drug users, which is exacerbated by criminalisation.

There were also double standards, partly to do with class, attached to drug-related stigma. The copious consumption of alcohol is pretty normalised in Australian society. Nicotine products are everywhere. Plenty of people take drugs over the weekend, then go to work at white-collar jobs on Mondays. Yet these types of use do not attract as much judgement from the mainstream, especially when the effects are not so obviously visible. Chapman reckoned that people who use drugs get disproportionately blamed and shamed for broader social issues. “Particularly people who inject drugs, particularly people who are underserved or under-resourced, or rough sleeping—they’re just a really easy scapegoat.”

*

I left the rallies wondering what the cold, hard evidence said about North Richmond. Was the area quantitatively less safe than in previous years? What did “safe” actually mean? Whose perceptions of safety were fair and reasonable? And was it possible to prove that the injecting room was a major factor behind some of the issues people had spoken about?

Data from the government’s Crime Statistics Agency showed that from 2023 to 2024, there had been a 21.9% increase in “criminal incidents” in Yarra, with Richmond being the suburb with the highest number. Looking back to past years in the column dedicated to “Assault and Related Offenses,” there was a trend of steady increase, from 820 incidents in 2018, to 1060 in 2022, to 1103 in 2024. But Victoria’s overall crime rate was at its highest since 2016. The increase could be part of this general trend. It could also be caused by many factors, including the cost of living crisis or broken, underfunded mental health services. How could anti-MSIR commentators be so sure that the facility was contributing to the increases in criminal incidents, when it may have even been mitigating against them?

Research conducted by the 2023 injecting room review also debunks some other common concerns. For example, the idea that the injecting room is a “honeypot” attracting people to North Richmond who wouldn’t have otherwise come is dubious. The report noted that 49% of clients who used the MSIR said they’d come to the suburb primarily to buy drugs, yet only 6% said the MSIR was their only reason for being in the area. People who used the service most frequently lived nearby.

Other issues were backed up by evidence, though. A graph depicting places where the council cleaners have picked up inappropriately disposed of syringes showed a hotspot increasing at the corner of Victoria St and Lennox St, near the MSIR, in the years after the facility opened. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence. (Still, another research paper found that appropriately of disposed syringes far outweighed the inappropriately disposed of ones.)

Some people continued to inject publicly, and community members had reported that they didn’t love seeing that. Why was this still happening? Often people didn’t want to use the MSIR because they were afraid of police who patrol the area, or they weren’t eligible; a person can't use the facility if they’re pregnant, on a court order, need another person to help them inject, or have been banned for being aggressive to staff or other clients (the last one can be temporary). Some harm reduction advocates think that in order to incentivise people to get off the street, the barriers to entering the service should be lowered. But while pragmatic, that is also controversial—no politician wants their face in the Herald Sun under a headline about unborn babies and heroin.

Clients who use the service often leave while intoxicated but stick around socialising in the surrounding area, which, on the one hand… who cares? Let the people chill. But some locals didn’t like this and thought it caused problems, especially when gatherings got noisy. One person told the review researchers that when people visited the community health centre for maternal and child health appointments, there were sometimes people having loud arguments outside the MSIR, which some found intimidating.

Finally, the review compared heroin-related fatal overdoses across two 42 month periods in the City of Yarra, before and after the injecting room opened; there was a downward trend compared to other locales, but still, 50 people had died (not in the MSIR, but in the area). That’s a lot of people. It’s tragic. You could understand distress from locals who were fairly regularly coming across dead bodies in the streets they walked through every day, and who had hoped that the MSIR would have had a bigger impact. The facility had saved a lot of lives and provided life-changing care to a lot of vulnerable people. But seven years after it had opened, for many in the area, it had been a disappointment.

Would moving the MSIR to St Vincent’s, as some people at the safe streets rally proposed, improve the facility's outcomes? When I’d spoken to Chapman, she didn't think so. The service's direct proximity to the Richmond drug market was crucial to its effectiveness. Also, she said, many people who inject drugs experience high levels of stigma when accessing health services, especially hospitals. Moving the facility away from the market and into the hospital would be yet another barrier inhibiting use. I also asked Simone Heald (CEO of North Richmond Community Health, the organisation that runs the MSIR, and someone with a great surname for a healthcare professional), what she thought of the proposal. She did not support it, and said that leadership at the hospital didn’t either.

And yet local politicians and community leaders were giving the impression that shifting the facility to St Vincent's was a live possibility. Arguably, this stopped people in the area from accepting that the facility was here to stay, and figuring out a way to live with it. It was enabling a pronounced form of NIMBYism.

*

There was no specific injecting room-related item on the 1113 page Yarra Council May meeting agenda, but I went down to the Richmond Town Hall on Bridge Road anyway. The meeting was upstairs, in a spacious hall with art deco fixings and an internal window displaying colourful multicultural brainstorm text decals. Pomo. An online livestream had been set up. The councillors sat at a U-shaped desk formation, facing rows of chairs set up for meeting attendees. These chairs were populated primarily by posh people from Fitzroy North, there to protest Piedemonte’s supermarket’s attempt to purchase a local laneway (part of an apartment development plan, a whole other story—one which, luckily, gonzo flâneur Guy Rundle was there to investigate).

The meeting started at 6:30 on the dot and moved at speed, with the Acknowledgement of Country galloped through by 6:31. Jolly was in populist form, fresh off the back of a Herald Sun interview where he'd said he was currently reading Trump's Art of the Deal (“I read everything from left to right”), styling himself as a sort of socialist Bob Katter of Australia’s wokest postcodes. As part of the “regime change,” the council was restructuring the way question time was conducted. Jolly kept prosecuting a free speech angle, wherein Yarra Council would supposedly let “a thousand flowers bloom.” This liberal approach was accompanied by a strictly-enforced three-minute timer and a terse tolerance of people who came to council meetings month after month to ask variations of the same question.

The last category applied to local resident Christine Maynard, who turned out to be the flip-flop-wearing woman from the rally. Maynard has a business that sells pastel-toned thongs adorned with brightly-coloured flowers—footwear that seems more suitable for a Gold Coast beach holiday than a wander through a busy inner city suburb with syringe-litter challenges. Last year, she had been forced to retire from running for Council after completing the wrong candidate training module, an error she firmly believed the Victorian Electoral Commission officer who'd approved her registration declaration should have picked up.

“Your question has been asked before, but in the interest of free speech, we're going to give you another crack at it,” Jolly said to Maynard. She put her lips close to the council mic.

“I’ve been here on a number of occasions,” she began. “And as I said when I was here the last time, I'll continue to come here every month until this is completed.” She was angry that, although the council had apparently spent millions of dollars on picking up inappropriately disposed syringes, she was still finding them; she thought the ratepayers deserved a refund; she could have brought a box of “paraphernalia” collected by a neighbour to this meeting as a “lovely souvenir” for the councillors, but luckily for them, she’d decided against it; she was horrified by rubbish left near her residence by the “African guy” and the “undesirables” from public housing—

“—sorry, Mayor, point of order,” Deputy Mayor Sarah McKenzie interjected. “We do not use language like that in the City of Yarra.”

“Yeah, I'm going to accept that,” Jolly said. “Listen, Christine. You just can't say that. Can you just ask a question, without the adjectives?”

Maynard harrumphed, then acquiesced. Sort of. “When are you going to get back that $3 million that's owed to ratepayers?”

Mary Osman, the council’s General Manager of City Sustainability and Strategy, gave an answer that it seemed she'd given many times before: the council continued to advocate to the state government and other agencies connected to the injecting room for more street cleaning services or, failing that, more money for the council to contract street cleaning services.

“I’m quite happy to meet up with you and give you an update too,” Jolly said to Maynard, before swiftly moving the meeting on.

*

At 7:45am this past Monday morning, I rode down Victoria Parade as the early morning sun glazed the city, heading to an 8am tour of the injecting room facility. Steam poured out of my mouth. Winter had come, definitively. At the pedestrian island facing the Gateway, I pulled up next to an antsy guy in high-vis who was holding a pair of sneakers and hitting a vape. “You want to go to war?” he said to me. Not really. It was a bit early. “You just did,” he said, looking away before jogging across Hoddle St in a gap in traffic.

On the footpath outside 23 Lennox St, a small group had gathered in front of Zena, a nurse who works at the MSIR. My visit was facilitated by Fireside, a communications and public relations agency contracted by North Richmond Community Health. Inside the facility’s entrance room, there was a front desk, and walls covered with printed information sheets, Aboriginal flags, painted boomerangs, and a wall pinned with notes from many global currencies. There was also an area filled with packs of different types of fresh needles, syringes, condoms, and other health-related paraphernalia, all boxed up neatly for people to take away with them.

We walked to the next room, where clients inject drugs. It’s a long, skinny, brightly-lit, sterile space, with a spotlessly clean floor and 20 numbered stations set up on stainless steel benches. Despite the medical feeling, there were still some decorative elements, like a dried, leafy branch tacked up on a wall behind a desk. Zena showed us a few different syringes, a pill crusher, and a vein-finding machine. She held the device over a tour attendee’s forearm to demonstrate how it worked. A fluorescent green square lit up a patch of her skin, revealing a network of tributaries. Three oxygen tanks sat in the centre of the room—easy to access if (when) there is an overdose.

Next, we entered the aftercare zone, which was more homely. There was a wall covered with clients’ artworks, thank you notes to staff, chalk drawings on blackboards, a poster with the wifi password (it starts with the word “Bingo”), fresh copies of the day’s newspapers, and some books. The pin-up board intimacy of the decorations reflected the sense of community and warmth that people often speak about happening in and around the facility: the bonds of trust between some of the clients and workers; the sense that the place is a brief refuge from the harsh judgments and stigma of so much life outside.

People who work in these often hectic frontline services and in advocacy tend to speak from a place of sanguine refusal to pass any kind of judgement on the choices of people who use drugs. They use a distinctive style of neutral, professional language—“clients,” “overdose events,” “cohorts,” “safer” over “safe,” never “addicts.” Sometimes, honestly, the cheery affect provoked a cynical response in me. But I came to see the sector’s seemingly bureaucratic terminology and its ideology of almost pathological acceptance as a powerful form of respect and sanity-preservation. It was an approach that had developed in response to the denigration, fear-mongering, and moralising that still comes from a significant portion of the public, the media, and the political class when they talk about services like the injecting room.

After the tour wrapped up, I met up with Andrea, a client who uses the facility regularly. She’s 22 years old and lives in the flats nearby. She was wearing red Adidas trackies, a cap, swaggy gold-framed sunglasses, and had black hair and a network of tattoos. She’d brought along a handful of notebook pages where she'd written out some talking points for our interview, and her manner of speaking was focused and fast-paced. Andrea said that there were a lot of stereotypes about people who use drugs that don't reflect the complexity of real life. “You’ll think that all drug users came from a childhood where their parents were drug users and like, lived in commission housing, and all that.” That isn’t true for her. She grew up in the south-eastern suburbs in a religious, middle-class family. She attended an all-girls’ Catholic school, played multiple instruments, and went to church three times a week: “I was very much that goody-two-shoes girl. Until I hit 17.”

Then, she started taking harder drugs more often, rebelling against her church-going mum, and moved into the city, where she worked for a period in the adult industry before quitting after her addiction made it impossible to keep up with regular work. Andrea has been injecting drugs since she was 19. She ended up homeless for a period, before her support workers got her miraculously fast-tracked on the public housing list, landing her in her current spot in Richmond. Now she lives in a flat with her cute cavoodle, Mocha, who she shows me a photo of on her phone home screen. She likes living in Richmond, and even though people have shit to say about it, she feels pretty safe, as long as she's smart and avoids going out after dark, when the area does become more dangerous. She wasn't working or studying at the moment—she’d tried to start training as a drug and health support worker earlier in the year, but had quit because she found it too triggering talking about methamphetamine in class.

At the moment, she uses the MSIR four or five times a week, multiple times on those days, to inject methamphetamine. She used to use heroin too, but she quit a few years ago. Even though methamphetamine is very low risk for overdose, Andrea goes to the injecting room because the place gives her a sense of community. “I go there for the social part—to be able to talk to people, to have education on safe injecting, and to be aware of any drug contamination alerts. Also, the staff there are really nice.” She said there were misconceptions about people who use the service. “We’re not all homeless, we’re not all violent. We’re not junkies. Please stop calling us that. It’s quite offensive.” She said that all sorts of people turn up at the MSIR’s door: businessmen in suits, tradies, women, men, young people, old people. “There’s a whole garden variety of drug users.” Everyone had a different story, a different life, different hobbies, different struggles. “We’re people just like you.”

What would she say to critics of the facility? Andrea consulted the note she’d written with responses to some common objections. “You say that the location is not great, because it’s right next to a primary school. I beg to differ,” she said. “The medical center has been here since before the safe injecting room”; during that time, it had been servicing people who now use the injecting room facility. Also: “Victoria Street has been a drug hotspot for 40 years or so.” People come to the area to buy and use drugs—that’s the fact of the matter. No evidence, statistical, anecdotal, or otherwise, suggests that if the injecting room was shut down completely tomorrow drug use would magically stop in North Richmond, near the primary school or elsewhere. In Andrea’s view, the proximity to public housing was also key to the success of the service. “Unfortunately, a lot of people that live in the towers do consume drugs intravenously, so it’s very beneficial for the injecting room to be here,” she said. It was where people would actually use it. And it only served its purpose if people actually used it. “If it wasn’t for the safe injecting room, I probably would not be speaking to you right now,” she said matter of factly. “Because I would be dead.”

While I’d been talking to Andrea, the MSIR had opened up for the day. As I headed off, a few people were walking up past the eucalyptus trees lining the pathway to the facility’s entrance. Maybe more injecting room facilities will open elsewhere in the city in future. They should. But for now, this place was just getting on with its job.