The director of Melbourne's new supervised injecting room has denied claims the local drug community is shunning the facility, saying it has already likely saved lives.
Victoria's first supervised injecting centre opened in Richmond on Saturday, but the Herald Sun reports that users are still shooting up in nearby laneways, parks and front yards.
"I'm not using it," one user said. "I don't know anything about it and neither does anyone I know."
But the North Richmond Community Centre's director Nico Clark said the facility has received "overwhelmingly" positive feedback from the 400 users who've visited in the first six days.
"Many people are very happy that they don't have to hide from society. That they can talk to somebody about their situation," Mr Clark told ABC radio on Friday.
"A third of the people have asked for our help with hepatitis C intervention. A quarter of them have asked for our help ... to link them into drug treatment."
Overdoses have been a regular event with between one to three a day, Mr Clark said.
"They required our intervention," he said.
"Some of those, I can say, had they occurred on the street and nobody had seen them would most likely have been fatal."
Mr Clarke said the volume of injecting room walk-ups - 95 per cent of whom are injecting heroin - has been "much higher ... than anyone was expecting", but the facility still needs to build trust.
"We haven't had a big public announcement about the opening, but the word is spreading quietly," he said.
Debate about the centre's effectiveness comes after police reported a woman was assaulted by two unknown men on Thursday morning while taking pictures of the facility and its clients.
