Amid a blaze of nationwide publicity, Australia's first public facility where heroin addicts can inject themselves, was opened in Sydney on May 3. Called the "T-Room," or "Tolerance Room," the facility is located in the Uniting Church's Wayside Chapel in the notorious King's Cross red light district. Sponsored by a group of Protestant and Catholic clergy, in alliance with some of the nation's most fanatic drug-legalization advocates, the shooting gallery will initially open two hours a day, three days a week.
Its very premise violates a New South Wales state law which carries a maximum penalty of a $2,200 fine or two years in jail, for "aiding and abetting self-administration of a prohibited drug." However, the room's sponsors, including Wayside's Rev. Ray Richmond, have pronounced themselves ready to go to jail. Meanwhile, T-Room sponsor and pro-dope campaigner Tony Trimmingham has said that the effort is the "thin edge of a wedge," and that there will soon be T-Rooms all over.
On May 5, the New South Wales police made an "inspection tour" of the room, but they made no arrests and they announced that they did not intend to "create martyrs."
The T-Room represents a dramatic escalation of the drive to legalise drugs, a drive which has now garnered the support of the Australian Catholic Church and the major Protestant denominations, the latter of whom, combined over a decade ago to form the Uniting Church, which officially runs the T-Room. Father Steve Sinn of the Catholic Church of St. Canice is a sponsor of the room, while the official spokesman of the Australian Catholic Church, Father Brian Lucas, told the ABC on May 4 that "churches have a duty to challenge the state on important issues."
Wittingly or not, the churches are fronting for the real forces leading the drive for legalised heroin: Australia's major banks and private family foundations which finance the nation's main pro-legalisation lobby, the Australian Drug Foundation (ADF), which is pushing for injection rooms.
One of the ADF's key leaders is Dr. Ethan Nadelman, executive director of the Lindesmith Center in New York, the flagship institution of mega-speculator George Soros's worldwide drive to legalise drugs. Police estimate that at least $7 billion a year is laundered through Australia's financial institutions, which are anxious to see that amount expanded. Funders of the ADF include Australia's Reserve Bank; the "big four" commercial banks (National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, and ANZ); and several major family foundations grouped around the Queen's Trust, whose patron is Prince Charles. Raw materials giant Rio Tinto, in which the Queen has heavily invested, has also poured millions into the legalization campaign.
The media crusade for legalization has been led by press barons Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, whose newspapers and TV stations have featured incessant coverage of the "exploding drug crisis," pictures of addicts injecting themselves in alleys, and so on. This campaign has prompted N.S.W. Premier Bob Carr, a former employee of Packer's, to call an unprecedented weeklong "Drug Summit" in Sydney beginning on May 17. About 135 state Members of Parliament and 80 representatives of community groups are expected to attend, and it will be chaired by Her Majesty's ranking Privy Councillor in Australia, former federal MP Ian Sinclair.
The T-Room was deliberately opened just before the drug summit, in order to make "legal injecting rooms" its main agenda item. While Carr has thus far opposed the rooms, his Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, is an outspoken supporter of them, and the head of the N.S.W. police force (the nation's largest), Peter Ryan, is also in favour. Ryan, a British cop who formerly conducted investigations for the British royal family, was brought in a few years ago to overhaul the N.S.W. police. He has sacked dozens of top officers, disbanded its highly effective anti-drug squad, and thoroughly demoralized the force, thus helping to create the present drug crisis.
To counter this lunacy, Lyndon LaRouche's associates in the Citizens Electoral Council (CEC) are circulating a dossier in their latest New Citizen newspaper, which exposes the banks and family funds pushing legalization, and counterposes to that, LaRouche's call for a real war on drugs. As LaRouche told an anti-drug conference in Mexico City in 1985, "The international drug-traffic has become an evil and powerful government in its own right. It represents today a financial, political, and military power greater than that of entire nations ... a government upon which we must declare war, a war which we must fight with the weapons of war, and a war which we must win in the same spirit the United States fought for the unconditional defeat of Nazism between 1941 and 1945."
