“I’d like to be a fly on your wall,” I said. “I’ll just sit there quietly, watching users inject.”

“No, we made a decision about that sort of thing a long time ago. We’re a health service, not a zoo,” said the guy who took my call at the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre. “Why don’t you come on one of our guided tours?”

“You have tours?”

“We started doing them when we first started out – mostly for health workers and the local community. Ten years later, we’re still doing tours.”

So, they took down my name and profession and, on a Tuesday afternoon, I attended a nondescript door in Kings Cross. A guard appeared and, offering neither a smile, snarl nor spruik, allowed me to step past him and into …

” … the only place in the country where it is legal to possess a small quantity of illicit drugs.”

The tour was already under way.

“What about pot?” I interrupted, as the door closed behind me.

The guide fell silent, and the five others on the tour turned around.

“Well,” I continued. “You can’t inject marijuana. Is it ok to possess that in here?”

“I’m guessing,” said the guide. “You would be the lawyer?”

“Busted,” I said. “Do you get many in here?”

“Let’s just say, we get all types.”

We were standing in what looked like the waiting room of a dentist, except that the happy teeth had been replaced with grinning livers. The guide went on to tell us about a recent user.

“She was very concerned about confidentiality, so we said: ‘If you’re worried, use an alias … what shall we call you?’ She responded: ‘But don’t you know who I am?’ ”

“What’s with that sign?” I said, interrupting again. “The one that says: ‘no drug talk’.”

“Our staff spend a lot of energy on this one,” sighed our guide.

She explained what seems obvious now. While the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act 1985 (NSW) provides an exemption for injecting of drugs (including, by the way, marijuana), the laws on trafficking remain unchanged. Of course, people like to share (think ‘shouting’) and sharing out of goodwill doesn’t feel like dealing so, to ensure nothing slips (from one user to another), the centre prohibits ‘drug talk’.

Given this, I was somewhat surprised when we entered the AEC-inspired injecting room and tucked under each stainless steel booth were two plastic chairs. Clearly, the users go marching two by two.

“Do people help each other inject?”

“No, it’s all DIY and users must know how to inject. Most have been doing it for more than a decade. The rule also helps to weed out journalists and wayward cops.”

The shared booths might be purely pragmatic in tight Sydney space, but our guide told us that, after an overdose, there will often be a peer exchange that goes something like this:

“Oh no, I didn’t O.D. did I?”

“Yeah you did! You were turning blue, you bastard.”

Our guide displayed the injecting paraphernalia and a device that staff clip on a finger to measure oxygen in blood if a user gets ‘noddy’. Below a certain level, the staff will intervene with oxygen, resuscitation or life-saving drugs. In 10 years, they’ve had more than 3,000 overdoses and not one death.

“We save a lot of brain cells as well,” said our guide. “Most people will wake up from an overdose, but we prevent brain damage. From a pharmacological perspective, heroin is less toxic than alcohol. But sometimes, it will stop you from breathing.”

We went through another door and into a sort of common room where there are always nurses present, helping users with their many health issues.

“People can’t go back to inject and they can’t smoke. Seeing as 95 per cent of users are smokers, things tend to take care of themselves.”

“Do the police ever hassle people coming or going?”

“Rarely. We have a good relationship with the local police. They support what we do.”

With the centre due to open, the tour dispersed. The place seemed so honest, I thought to myself, as I left its world of drugs and drug users, and stepped back into another.