The Wire

Drug use in prisons is one of those dirty topics very few politicians want to confront. Australian state and territory governments continue to ignore the long campaign by prisoner support groups to have needle exchange programs set up to avoid the use of dirty needles and minimise the health risks to prisoners. Justice Action, which publishes the prison newspaper, Just Us has claimed in its latest edition that more than one third of Australia’s prisoners are infected with hepatitis C due in large part to injecting drug use. They are one of the voices saying a needle exchange program is needed to drastically reduce that figure. Internationally there are 19 needle exchange programs, which started in Switzerland in 1996. Other countries tend to use two systems, a needle vending machine or exchange controlled by the jail counsellor. I spoke to Michael Levy, the Acting Director of the Centre for Health Research and Criminal Justice who has visited programs run in Spain and Germany to ask how the international programs were working.