Special "consumption rooms", where homeless drug-users could use and store drug equipment should by provided in hostels, the director of the largest voluntary drug-counselling service in the State has said.
Mr Tony Geoghegan, director of the Merchant's Quay Project, said many homeless drug-users were excluded from emergency hostel accommodation and were, as a result, more likely to be engaged in high-risk drug use.
Speaking at the publication of Wherever I Lay My Hat, A Study of Out of Home Drug Users in Dublin yesterday, he said the majority of homeless clients interviewed in the study were involved in dangerous drug use.
"They often shared equipment with other intravenous drug-users in unhygienic and unsafe conditions, leaving themselves vulnerable to overdose and infection," he said. "Those who were sleeping rough were at the greatest risk, both to themselves in terms of their physical well-being, and to the wider community in terms of the public health risks associated with discarded needles.
"Those staying in hostels were not as likely to share, as they often used more safely in the secrecy of their own rooms." Emergency accommodation for drug-users should have facilities for the safe use and storage of injecting equipment, including sinks, bleach and lockers, he added.
"In addition, the provision of sharps-bins in hostels for safe disposal of injecting equipment would be welcomed." The report also recommended the distribution of injecting equipment, sterile swabs and water to drug-users sleeping rough who would otherwise have very limited access to such equipment. "In addition," it said, "it is vital that [outreach] workers carry emergency injecting packs with them." It recommends that the Eastern Health Board mobile methadone clinic be made available to homeless drug-users who cannot access a methadone programme because they don't have a fixed address.
For the study, 75 per cent (190) of the clients presenting at the Merchants Quay Project between February 8th and 12th this year were asked to complete questionnaires.
Some 63 per cent, 120, were found to be homeless while just 7 per cent reported they had never experienced being homeless. Homelessness was defined as staying in a hostel, staying in a B&B, staying with friends or relatives, staying in a squat or sleeping rough. Some 66 per cent said their drug use had changed since they became homeless. They said they used more frequently, while 49 per cent said they shared injecting equipment, 16 per cent that they had recently lent their injecting equipment and 24 per cent that they recently borrowed injecting equipment.
A spokeswoman for the Eastern Health Board said the board, with Dublin Corporation, was seeking premises to open a high-support hostel for homeless drugusers, although she stressed it was not envisaged that drug use on the premises would be facilitated.
Some £5 million was set aside in the Budget to provide such hostel facilities, as well as facilities for homeless people with alcohol addiction problems, in Dublin over the next two years. Wherever I Lay My Hat was commissioned by the Franciscan Social Justice Initiatives, with the support of the Poverty, Drug Use and Policy Programme run by the Combat Poverty Agency.
