A photo of a woman passed out on a park bench while her baby sleeps in a nearby pram has sent shockwaves through a community accustomed to rampant scenes of drug abuse.
The image, captured in the inner-city suburb of Richmond, shows a young woman slumped on the seat in front of what appears to be a baby seated in a pram on the footpath.
It comes amid renewed calls for the Victorian State Government to scrap a safe injecting facility, which is situated on Lennox Street in North Richmond.
A disturbing image captured in the Richmond area appears to show a young woman passed out on a park bench in front of a baby in a pram
Paramedics work on a man who appears to have overdosed on a Richmond street
A man lays in a Richmond gutter under the apparent effects of drugs
On Thursday, a man’s body was found outside a primary school near the government-backed safe injecting room.
The facility is touted as a ‘hygienic place where people can inject drugs in a supervised health setting’.
‘This means that if someone overdoses in the room, a staff member can respond immediately,’ its website reads.
Victoria Police confirmed the grim discovery near the entrance of Richmond West Primary school about 6.50am on Thursday.
The death, which saw the school put into lockdown, is believed to be drug-related.
The school is just 140m away from North Richmond Community Health, which opened the injecting room in 2018 for a two-year trial.
The facility has drawn mixed reactions from the community with protests calling for the centre to be relocated away from local schools, with many spotting used syringes close by.
Among a host of disturbing images to appear in the hours following yesterday’s tragedy was one of a man sprawled across the footpath – his legs dangling off the gutter onto the road – in broad daylight.
‘This has to stop. This is not acceptable. This is not fair on our kids’, one woman wrote on Facebook.
‘Planning laws prohibit brothels being close to schools – why would the government allow an injecting room close to a school. Absolutely disgraceful,’ another wrote.
A person shoots up in a Richmond street in between two parked cars
A drug-affected person slumps in a gutter in an ordinary Richmond street
A man on crutches shoots up near the safe injecting facility in Richmond
Other locals have called out authorities for normalising the behaviour of local drug addicts.
‘I’m in shock how authorities treated this issue. Nothing, absolute silence like it is normal,’ another woman said.
Another Richmond resident shared a picture of an individual injecting themselves in a local street next to a parked car.
‘Thanks to the medically supervised injection room’s take away doggy bag, people are now shooting up on the street’.
Police were called to the school on Wednesday afternoon after another man was spotted allegedly behaving erratically.
The drug-affected male was walking past the school yelling and pouring water over his body before doing push-ups on the ground.
That man was charged with trespassing, possessing a controlled weapon and breaching bail.
Locals said they avoid sending their children to the primary school due to the unpredictable behaviour of local junkies.
A group of drug user are seen shooting up underneath a commission flat building on Lennox Street in North Richmond, right next to the safe injecting room and not far from a primary school and popular shopping strip in August
Needles and rubbish are seen left in gutters, car parks and laneways just off Victoria Street in North Richmond in August during stage four lockdown
COVID-19 did little to stop Richmond’s tragic love affair with illicit drugs, with users openly doing drugs throughout last year’s pandemic
‘It’s sad because l hear it’s actually a good school. No way we were going to send our daughter there though,’ one parent wrote online.
National Homeless Collective chief executive Donna Stolzenberg told Daily Mail Australia closing the facility was not the answer.
‘Rather than shut down the (injecting room) we must focus on funding better pathways to addiction support and recovery,’ she said.
‘The fact people choose to use the facility shows they want support and do not want to succumb to the effects of the drugs they are using.’
Ms Stolzenberg said while the location of the facility was contentious due to its proximity to the school, parents were still seeing drug use, drug deaths and drug paraphernalia littered throughout the school grounds well before it was built.
‘This has been reduced considerably since the opening of the rooms.
‘Given there are schools in almost every suburb in Melbourne there would be virtually no place to move the facility that was not in the direct pathway of a school.’
While the images have sparked furore among the wider community, many Richmond locals continue to argue that drug addicted people have been present in the area for generations.
‘So sometime in the past thirty years – lots of people ignored what the local area was like when they moved there … Richmond has a drug problem,’ one man posted on Friday.
Police were called to the primary school on Wednesday after reports a man was allegedly behaving erratically by ‘dosing his body in water’ (pictured)
Inside Richmond’s Medically Supervised Injecting Room
The Medically Supervised Injecting Room in Melbourne is again under fire
Even Melbourne’s Stage Four lockdown last year could not stem the area’s tragic drug culture.
Disturbing pictures captured by Daily Mail Australia in August showed addicts without masks brazenly injecting themselves outside the North Richmond facility.
Syringes were later seen scattered across the footpath along with broken glass and discarded cigarette butts.
But Health Minister Martin Foley continues to back the injecting room’s location.
‘Where the drug market operates, sadly, is in the North Richmond community, and that is where this centre is and that is where it will continue to operate for the rest of this five-year trial that is under way,’ he told the Herald Sun on Thursday.
‘That is why every independent review that has looked at this process supports it being where the harm is, and that is why this government will continue to support it.’
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