Art from the Heart returns for its 14th year

Now in its 14th year, the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre’s (MSIC) Art from the Heart annual exhibition has been judged and winners announced, only this year things were a lot different from the previous shows.

Art from the Heart: People Before Profits was due to be held at 107 Project in Redfern, but as the venue was closing for good, the physical show was only up for one afternoon.

The rest of the show, which is open until 13 October, is migrating entirely online, with an auction where all proceeds go to the artists. This year has seen a record 150 entries and once again the standard of work is high.

Art from the Heart: People Before Profits will be followed shorty after it closes by the NSW Drug Summit in November which will be a chance for the state to change possession and treatment laws for drug users by appealing directly to lawmakers and support staff.

Dr. Marianne Jauncey is a public health doctor and has been the Medical Director at the MSIC since 2008 and sees the upcoming summit in urgent terms, especially as it comes at a time Australia is facing a new and deadly opioid crisis.

A recent online meeting of 60 drug professionals, volunteers across the drug and homeless sectors gave Jauncey hope that attitudes are changing and that it is now time to let the politicians and bureaucrats know.

“Frontline workers are appalled that they can’t get their clients into treatment, Dr Jauncey said.

“It is known that broader society’s showing an increased support for drug law reform and increased support for harm reduction measures.”

To get any shift in approaches to drug possession and treatment one of the pubic sectors that needs to be won over is the police force.

“The difficulty with police, like all pubic servants, is that they are employees of the government and they are bound to sing from the government song sheet,” Jauncey said.

“When you talk with police privately they often think that drugs should be decriminalised, but they can’t say that publicly.

“I think that a lotto police get it, but they can’t speak out against it without losing their jobs, which is why we need to go straight to the top and speak with our elected officials.”

Nitazenes are a synthetic opioid first developed sixty years ago as a morphine alternative, but never released as it was regarded as too dangerous.

It is increasingly found in heroin, cocaine, synthetic cannabinoids, ketamine and oxycodone tablets and an amount as small as a couple of sugar grains can be fatal.

“The difference between a therapeutic does can be wafer thin,” Jauncey said.

“They were first identified in Australia in 2021 and the number of drug alerts and the different substances that nitazenes have been found in is only going in one direction, and that is up.”

Jauncey’s plea for those in power attending the drug summit is one of urgency.

“All of these things mean that we need to be concerned and in order t respond effectively we need to put aside the ideology that has held us in suspense and unable to make practical inroads because fear from politicians that they will have an electoral backlash,” Jauncey said.

Recent polling by Uniting and others show that this is not the case as Jauncey added “Our job is to point out to the politicians that this isn’t the vote loser that they think.”

Meanwhile the MSCI is encouraged by some shifts in pubic attitudes.

“There has been a massive change in community attitudes to mental health but we are not quite there when it comes to substance abuse,” Jauncey said.

Forging new bonds wth each other and the wider community and changing attitudes to addiction is in part of what Art from the Heart: People Before Profits is achieving.

Winner of the 2024 Art from the Heart 2024 competition are Megan Moses, Geoffrey, JB, Mike C, Alli and Kimberley Scales and you can find their work on the show’s site.

Find the Art from the Heart website here.