The NSW Users & AIDS Association

Many crucial matters in rural and regional New South Wales have been raised in the course of this edition’s production.

A worrying trend is the apparent increase in people who inject pharmaceuticals accidentally hitting an artery and causing severe health damage. This is a risk for anyone who has vein damage, of course, but the difficulties that injectors of pharmaceuticals face in obtaining filters and accessing proper harm reduction information means they’re especially at risk.

There is a critical shortage of pharmacotherapy prescribers in many rural areas, such as where I live. My town has a pharmacotherapy clinic located at the base hospital. Until about two years ago the clinic had one full-time doctor who, although he treated you with less dignity than was ideal, was available to put clients on a program at the adjacent clinic. Since his departure, the hospital has been unable to find a replacement and has had several doctors acting as locums, treating current patients whenever they can manage to travel up from their regular practices.

Life in Tamworth is pretty laid back. But if you want to score street drugs here, you’d have to go somewhere else. There’s been no heroin here for the last few years, and the stuff they call Ice here is terrible. It’s not worth buying.

I started using drugs like most users do, as a recreational thing. I smoked weed and snorted speed. I was 14, living at home with both parents, pooling any money my friends could find to buy whatever drug we could buy on the weekend. Life was fun.