Piers Akerman notes that the Uniting Church has purchased the Kings Cross building in which its Medically Supervised Injecting Centre operates:
It quietly paid about $7.1 million for 66 Darlinghurst Rd – the building occupied by the shooting gallery – seven months ago and settled in double-quick time.
The price seems to be a record for the area which has had a decline in property sales and prices seriously affected because of the presence of the junkies attracted to the shooting gallery.
As one local told me yesterday: “Prices here are badly affected. One nearby property around the $5.5 million mark has been to auction twice and failed to sell because of the junkies who hang out for drugs near here.”
The same person, a strong supporter of the Cross, said other areas were booming with two new banks and a Hungry Jacks franchise all being renovated.
Keeping the unfortunate people who suffer from substance abuse and addiction safe and alive, and providing them access to treatment referrals, can’t be acceptable when it jeopardises hard-working Australians’ right to sell their property for millions of dollars.
Here’s an outrageous suggestion – if the usage of the safe injecting centre is so great that it is increasing the concentration of drug users in the surrounding area, wouldn’t that suggest that the best solution is to implement more of these centres at other locations?
Ackerman has nothing else criticise about it.
In 2007, he used an independent report as his ‘evidence’ that the MSIC was doomed. He hasn’t mentioned it since. Why?
“Put simply, the reports produced by the heroically named Medically Supervised Injecting Centre fall apart when examined by competent and genuinely independent experts.
A review of the statistics by Dr Joe Santamaria (former head of community medicine, St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne); Dr Stuart Reece (addiction medicine specialist, Brisbane); Dr Lucy Sullivan (social researcher); Dr Greg Pike (director of Southern Cross Bio-Ethics Institute, Adelaide) and Gary Christian (senior manager, welfare industry) demonstrate that despite the claims of the shooting gallery’s advocates, it is unlikely to have saved even one life.”
-May 2007. The Daily Telegraph.
The author list reads like a who’s who of NOT to listen to:
The founder of Christian fundamentalist group, The Australian Family Association.
A doctor accused by the Queensland Medical Board of endangering the safety of patients and of being `grossly deficient’ who maybe responsible for the deaths of up to 31 patients … he even performed`exorcisms’.
2 doctors who deny the importance of the needle exchange program, methadone and Harm Minimisation.
A DFA member who believes in Noah’s Ark.
ALL of them have written before about their dislike of MSIC. And this was Ackerman’s “evidence” that the report from medical experts was wrong.
Ackerman is a loon.
Thanks for the info about that report, Terry. Yep, he’s definitely off the planet. He makes his living by crusading against whatever he thinks talk radio audiences will want him to crusade against. His columns end up filled with contradictions and halfway to incoherence because he is simply trying to string together a series of one-liners mocking his targets.
I’m amazed that he bothered to draw on “evidence” at all – normally his opinion is gospel. I love his response to a commenter in the article discussed above, too: “I blame the idiot Left who have long sought the degradation of community standards.”