Night approaches and a wintry chill urges the few hunched pedestrians on their way. It is mid-week and inner Melbourne seems shut down. Around here heroin is often in your face. Knowing kids in baggy trackpants palm gear to passing clients; users loll and shuffle around the laneways.

Nine storeys above the darkened streets, in one of those newly fashionable urban apartments─all glass and views and open space─the sophisticated city is meeting the working-class suburbs.

Drugs have brought together this little group, from Springvale and Footscray and St Kilda, to meet their inner-city allies who live less than a block from Russell Street, hub of the urban drug trade. The meeting of eight includes Ed Demirdjian, whose wife Carol founded Footscray Matters; Le Hoa Whysham, president of the Springvale Traders Association; and a long-time St Kilda resident, Ken McLean.

They have in common this much: vehement opposition to the State Government's proposed trial of supervised injecting facilities. They decide to call themselves Drug Action 2000─DA2K for short. It sounds like a rap band rather than what they are: a group of new, 50-something policy lobbyists on a learn-as-you-go plan.

At their centre is Peter Faris, Queen's counsel and former head of the National Crime Authority. If anyone should know that conventional law enforcement has failed to stem the heroin trade, it is he. Yet here he seems opposed to innovation.

As head of Residents 3000, a city lobby group, Faris has said he does not care where a facility goes as long as it is not in the CBD, but he maintains injecting rooms are not the solution in anyone's backyard.

He lives on Exhibition Street but has led the opposition elsewhere, getting a standing ovation from what had been a fearful and angry crowd at Springvale Town Hall last month. Two weeks ago, at a protest organised by the group calling itself Footscray Matters, a queue of like-minded people greeted him at the door.

Last week Greater Dandenong Council ruled itself out of the government's injecting-room trial. Faris thinks that this decision in ALP heartland, with nine out of 11 councillors aligned to the Labor Party, signals the beginning of the end for the government's drug strategy.

`I think it is amazing stuff that a Labor council has listened to ratepayers and the people who voted them in rather than the Labor Party in Spring Street,' he says.

It listened in part to a wild and rowdy public meeting that shocked even Faris.'I haven't injected emotion into this debate,' Faris says in his defence.'It is already there because people are torn over this issue. It's the government's fault for forcing the community to register their opposition, for putting the people on the offensive or else copping it (a trial) in their communities.

`I am just one person who has, to a degree, been thrust into this role because of circumstance. I don't have spin doctors, I don't have public relations people. I don't have the millions of dollars.

`What councils are doing is phoney South Yarra-type consultation, which is fine for people who have a number of tertiary degrees and write submissions professionally. If your average working-class person comes home after work they aren't going to sit down and write something.'

Phoney South Yarra-type consultation? Over two weeks Greater Dandenong held workshops and that wild meeting. The process revealed an unyielding 90 percent opposition, says council chief executive Warwick Heine. But set alongside the programs Yarra and Port Phillip councils ran, it looks hasty and truncated.

Yarra has had a drugs forum since 1996. It was formed amid concerns over the street trade in Smith Street, Collingwood, where dealers operated a take-away service, trading through the open windows of cars. The Yarra Health and Drugs Forum has about 90 members, drawn from local health and welfare agencies, police, government departments, residents and business people. It meets about 10 times a year and supervised injecting facilities have been raised several times, Yarra mayor John Phillips says.

Last December a public meeting at Collingwood Town Hall discussed injecting rooms, followed by another meeting at Richmond Town Hall. Each drew about 200 people. From mid-February to early March there were 12 meetings, including a series for particular interest groups, such as local business people, school principals and different ethnic groups.

`There will never be unanimous support for this,' Phillips says. `This triggers extreme emotions in people. It's blood related. It's a needle prick, maybe it has some AIDS connotations to it.' However, `I think once people are given the information and have time to digest it, there is a much more rational or compassionate response.'

Port Phillip mayor Julian Hill says his council had discussed the issue for more than a year. In the last three months of last year it held a series of meetings, with drug and welfare agencies, and for the public. A further public forum on safe injecting facilities in March drew just 30 people: `It doesn't seem to be an issue any more,' Hill says.

Both councils had adopted in-principle support for injecting facilities by the end of last year. The problem, says Hill, is that holding a rational public meeting is now impossible `with the rogue elements that are playing politics . . . I'm only concerned about Dandenong's decision in one sense: it may give the vigilante groups some comfort. I think Maribyrnong will be coming under increasing pressure from some of the rogue elements'.

Yesterday Maribyrnong was finalising a reference group that will oversee the development of its drugs strategy by the end of this year. It had a similar experience to Dandenong: after about half an hour, a mass public meeting in March ceased to function as an information exchange. Speakers were drowned out by a hooting crowd.

`It was clear anyone who was anti-injecting facilities was not interested in listening,' Maribyrnong mayor Gerard White says. `I was a bit disappointed with that meeting. I was wanting people, wherever they stood, to have their case heard.' He does not know which way his community is leaning, but he does know divisions run deep.

Footscray Matters staged its own protest meeting two weeks ago. Peter Faris and Carol Demirdjian led it, and when supporters of injecting facilities tried to speak they were howled down. Tonya Stevens, a new councillor, says she was disheartened by abuse: `Throw the bitch out,' someone called. `We know where you live,' threatened another.

Veteran youth worker Les Twentyman says the meeting was a shambles: `Someone walked past me and said, `If my kid gets on drugs, you're f****** dead,' and I felt like saying `If your kid gets on drugs, he will be dead if we keep going on with this siege mentality'. I hate drugs. I have buried 48 kids in the past eight years. While these people keep procrastinating, kids keep dying.'

Twentyman says he was dismayed when the meeting would not allow elected representatives, including Stevens, and the local state MP, Bruce Mildenhall, to speak in favour of injecting rooms.

Demirdjian says a trial will do nothing for the 271 people who died outside the five proposed trial municipalities. She says her group may not participate in the Maribyrnong reference group because it is stacked 75 percent in favour of a trial of injecting rooms. Nothing less than an official poll of residents will satisfy her.

Footscray Matters has spawned a reaction, a group in favour of an injecting facility calling itself Footscray Cares. It claims about 100 members and says the estimated 350 who turned out to the Footscray Matters protest is a misleading figure because it included people who supported a facility but who were not allowed to voice their opinion.

Footscray Cares spokeswoman Marian Burford is pleased public meetings are unlikely to feature again: `Any attempt at a public meeting is just going to be a slanging match.'

Demirdjian says an injecting-room trial in Footscray is a case of a working-class suburb bearing a burden for the western half of the state, but Burford responds by suggesting she should notice where people are dying. White says it is unclear how representative either group is.

It is in Labor areas that the government is striking its strongest opposition. One observer noted that at Maribyrnong, Faris seemed to `dress down for Footscray' in jeans and a T-shirt. Faris counters that his roots are in Footscray. `I am not a silvertail who is slumming it. My Who's Who tells me that Professor Penington went to Scotch College, Melbourne University and is a member of the Melbourne Club. My CV reads nothing like that. If anyone is speaking down to people it's him, not me.'

Hill acknowledges the stronger opposition in Dandenong and Footscray reflects the make up of the communities. Blue-collar areas seem to favour a punitive approach to drug crime, whereas the inner suburbs, with a higher proportion of tertiary-educated residents, seem more inclined to view it as a health issue.

Demirdjian says that Dandenong and Maribyrnong are more family-oriented suburbs, with fewer young people living alternative lifestyles. `They are much poorer suburbs . . . it's not

about not-in-my-back-yard, it's about protecting a vulnerable community.'

But Faris suspects there is dormant opposition in Port Phillip and Yarra that will emerge when locations of injecting facilities are nominated. `We'll pick them up when it is their turn to go apeshit,' he says.