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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4199 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

Obviously, the girl had cajoled the bloke into coming up there and he collapsed into unconsciousness on the couch. There it was happening right in front of us. He had shot up whatever the concoction was that he had had. That his friend had the wherewithal to take him there is more than likely what saved that young man's life.

I have seen people close to death and I have been with people when they have died. One of the young ladies at DRIC kept this man alive by breathing for him. His brain was that addled by whatever cocktail he had consumed that she actually had to tell him to breathe. She stood next to this guy and said, "In, in, in", and he would breathe in. If she did not say, "Out", he would not breathe out. She would go, "Out, out, out, in, in, in, out, out, out". For the couple of minutes that I sat and watched, this girl had this boy's life in the palm of her hand. It was as simple as that; she kept him alive. It is because DRIC was there and his friend had the sense to take him there that the young man is, I assume, still alive. I left and the ambulance drivers arrived. They spoke to him and gave him an injection that revived him. It was because he had someone to take him somewhere that he could get the help that he needed that, I assume, he is still alive today.

The point of all of that is that you do not have to like it and you do not have to be comfortable with it; but, if you are not comfortable with it, then I think you really need to reassess your position. I have fears about this matter, but I am willing to confront my fears and my fears about having a medically-supervised injecting place in my city should not stand between somebody and their life. If you do not get emotional about this matter and if you do not get afraid about it, then I believe that you really need to reassess your own life. But we should not let our fears stand in the way of their opportunity for rehabilitation. We should not let what I will call our prejudices - I say that in a nice way; I cannot think of another word for it - or where we are in life stand between them and their opportunity in life. We should not let it stand between an opportunity to try something new.

If you go back through the history of drug taking and the abuse of drugs you will find that it is a long one. It is as long as recorded history itself. I am told that you can go back to the ancient Egyptians and the supervised use of cannabis, for instance, in childbirth. While the women were using it to relieve the pain of childbirth, some of the men were probably out in the waiting room using it to relieve the agony of childbirth for blokes. As you go down through history, witchdoctors, shamen, medicine men and those sorts of people clearly were using hallucinogenic drugs. The word "assassin" comes from "hashshashkin", a Middle East cult that used hashish to indoctrinate its workers and its members for 1,000 years. The British Empire at the height of its power fought to control the drug trade in China. Three drug wars were fought, opium wars. What we need to do is look at this matter in a way that says, "We will not cloud what it is we do with our own prejudices, because we have no right to stand between somebody and an opportunity of life".

The Chief Minister spoke about being ready physically to give up addiction. It is a combination of being ready physically and mentally. I understand that we have profiles now that say that, if drug addicts can survive until their early-30s or mid-30s, the mind and the body come into sync and say to each other, "Guys, you have to give this up or we will all be stuffed". Ms Tucker spoke earlier about how many times it took to get off

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