Drug treatment centre calls for national clean needles services

SERVICES should be set up across the country to provide clean needles to problem drug users, according to the nation’s biggest voluntary drug treatment centre.

Merchants Quay Ireland (MQI) said it understood many people objected to such facilities as they believed they endorsed drug use. In advance of publishing its annual review for 2006 today, MQI director Tony Geoghegan said needle exchanges were needed not only to reduce the risk of lethal diseases, such as hepatitis C and HIV, but to provide a first point of contact between addicts and treatment.

“In order to effectively address this problem we need significant investment in new first-line harm reduction services across all affected areas so that users can, at the earliest opportunity, be brought into the network of treatment services in their own local areas,” he said.