Disgusting moment man smokes a 'crack pipe' on packed Melbourne tram
A male passenger has been spotted openly smoking a 'crack pipe' on a packed tram during rush hour last week.
One commuter captured the disturbing image of the man brazenly smoking the drug on the 58 tram line headed to West Coburg, an inner Melbourne suburb, at 5.15pm last Thursday.
The man was seen smoking a substance from the 'crack pipe' in front of dozens of passengers, many of whom were children.
'I couldn't believe what I was seeing,' the female commuter said.
'This guy just lit up this crack pipe and started smoking it as if it was a cigarette.
'He was so blasé about it. He couldn't have cared less that there were young kids on the train.'
She added: 'He was taking up two seats and just kept puffing away. No one said or did anything. Even though the guy was young, I think people were worried what the reaction might have been.
'People smoking drugs can be erratic and capable of anything.'
The harrowing image comes after a report released in October 2024 showed that 547 Victorians died from overdose in 2023.
Men are on average twice as likely as women to die from overdose, and people aged between 35 and 54 are most at risk.
Metropolitan Melbourne accounts for approximately three-quarters of overdose deaths.
The figures, released by the Coroners Court of Victoria, are a very slight improvement to the 550 overdose deaths recorded in 2022, which was the highest annual number of overdoses deaths recorded in the past decade.
In 2023, the five top contributing drugs to overdose deaths were diazepam, with 213 deaths, heroin, with 204 deaths, methamphetamine, with 164 deaths, alcohol, with 153 deaths and pregabalin, with 78 deaths.
The annual number of methamphetamine-involved overdose deaths in Victoria more than tripled between 2014 and 2023 from 53 to 164 deaths.
The percentage of these deaths that involved methamphetamine alone was 15.5 per cent while 84.5 percent involved other drugs.
Judge John Cain, the Victorian State Coroner said: 'It is deeply troubling that 547 Victorians lost their lives to overdose last year.
'These deaths are preventable and we must strengthen our public health response and increase access to supports and treatment.
'Drug-related harms are complex and are driven by a variety of factors including changes in drug use, availability and regulation.
'That is why coronial data is so integral to understanding how best to target resources and save lives.'
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Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Melbourne rich lister threatens to take feud with Australia's most exclusive day spa to court over racism claims
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The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
A perfect storm of errors meant Darren was placed in an unsafe cell. He died two days later
Warning: this story contains descriptions of self-harm and some readers might find it distressing. When Darren Brandon was detained at Melbourne assessment prison, a perfect storm of missed paperwork and a lack of clear intake procedure between police and the jail meant he was assessed as being low risk of self-harm. This could not have been further from the truth, according to his brother Steve. Darren lived with a serious brain injury after a motorcycle accident. It had left him with memory problems and bouts of depression. The family home where he lived had been sold after the death of his mother and Darren was between accommodation. 'Everything in our family just went upside down,' Steve tells Guardian Australia. In June 2018, when he found out Darren had been picked up by police, Steve says he and his father thought, 'Look, at least he's safe. He's not sleeping in his car on the street somewhere. He's safe. He's in care.' 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'It was quick in, see what the people are like, decide what treatment to give them and see them in a few weeks' time, if I was lucky. 'The rate of mental illness – acute mental illness and psychosis and depression and loads of mental health disorders – was absolutely vast.' A scathing report published in February by WA's Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services emphasised that Hakea is overcapacity and a prison in crisis. After a 2024 visit, the inspector, Eamon Ryan, formed a view that prisoners in Hakea were being treated 'in a manner that was cruel, inhuman, or degrading' and noted suicides, suicide attempts and assaults. There were 13 attempted suicides in the first quarter of that year, the same number as took place in the whole of 2023. Physical and mental health services 'were overwhelmed', with a nurse-to-prisoner ratio of approximately one to 86, and only three full time-equivalent psychiatrist positions for the state's entire prison system. 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Programs to modify cell design are expensive and can leave rooms inhospitable and cold, something that in turn may cause a deterioration in inmates' mental health. But Neil Morgan, a former WA inspector of custodial services, says a balance must be struck. 'I came across examples where changes were being made to cells … where the new beds were riddled with hanging points,' he says. 'Now that struck me as absolutely ludicrous in this day and age. Changes were only made after I raised my concerns.' Darren Brandon was a brilliant mechanic before his brain injury, Steve says. He had a coffee machine at his workshop and loved to host visitors and chat. 'He worked on Porsches and BMWs, all the high-end stuff,' he says. 'But he could work on anything.' But the motorbike accident hit him hard. The coroner noted his repeated attempts at suicide and self-harm. 'The up and down, the depression – this was the side-effects of his brain injury,' Steve says. '[Some days] he could go back to being like a standup comedian. I mean, he was so sharp and just witty and funny.' After the family home was sold, Darren began a residential rehabilitation program but left, and was reported to police as a missing person. When he went to a police station accompanied by a case manager, he was taken into custody due to a missed court date. Prison staff were not fully aware of his history of self-harm. This meant he was given a lower risk rating and was placed in a unit with a known hanging point and which was not under hourly observation. The coroner overseeing the inquest found that the design of Darren's cell was the 'proximate cause' of his death. He wrote that the 'rail inside the cell was known to be a ligature point well prior to Darren's death'. A spokesperson for Victoria's Department of Justice and Community Safety said the state's prisons had strong measures in place to reduce self-harm and suicide, including the use of on-site specialist mental health staff and training in the identification of at-risk inmates. Inmates are now required to undergo a mental health risk assessment within 24 hours of arriving in custody and are seen by a mental health professional within two hours of being identified at risk of self-harm. The state government has aimed to build all new cells in accordance with safer design principles for more than 20 years. 'The Victorian Government continues to invest in modern prison facilities to improve the rehabilitation and safety of people in custody,' the spokesperson said. Steve and his wife, Annie, keep a photo of Darren on their fridge. There are so many what-ifs. So many moments when something could have gone differently. 'If he'd been assessed properly, they would have said, 'Oh, this guy's had some attempts in the past, brain injury … OK, let's put him in a safer spot where there's no ligature points,'' Steve says. 'He'd still be alive.' Annie says: 'The system certainly failed him, and us as a family.' In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at
ITV News
2 days ago
- ITV News
Jails in England and Wales 98.3% full as prison crisis continues
Prisons in England and Wales are 98.3% full, despite the population falling slightly since the government accepted recommendations of a recent sentencing review. There are now 1,448 prison places available - up from 961 last month, when the estate was running at 98.9% capacity. But HM Prison and Probation Service says it can't run the estate efficiently at over 95% occupancy. The UK's prisons estate has been under so much pressure that thousands of inmates have been released early to prevent the system clogging up, a situation that the justice secretary warned could lead to the "break down of law and order". If prisons are full, police cells would have to be used to house offenders - but when they reach capacity, officers would no longer be able to carry out arrests, Shabana Mahmood said last month. A Ministry of Justice spokesperson said: 'We are building new prisons and are on track for 14,000 places by 2031 – the largest expansion since the Victorians. "Our sentencing reforms will also force prisoners to earn their way to release or face longer in jail for bad behaviour, while ensuring the most dangerous offenders can be kept off the streets.' Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced an extra £7 billion to fund 14,000 more prison places in her spending review on Wednesday, and up to £700 million per year into reform of the probation system. Unveiling the funding in the Commons, she said "must feel safe" in their local community, "safe in the knowledge that when people break the law, they feel the full force of the law". "But the party opposite left our prisons overflowing and on the brink of collapse, and they left it to us to deal with the consequences." Unions welcomed the cash but questioned whether it would be enough to fix alleviate pressures on the system. Rachel Harrison, GMB national secretary, said "fresh money for the police, prisons and probation is something we've long called for... but, as ever, the proof will be in the pudding as to whether this is enough money – and if it ends up in the right places.' The government, which commissioned a review into prisons by Conservative former justice secretary David Gauke, has accepted many of his recommendations. New policies include allowing well behaved offenders to serve one third of their sentence, rather than half and scrapping short sentences of less than 12 months, apart from in exceptional circumstances such as domestic abuse cases. There have also been calls to improve rehabilitation inside prisons, given 53% of those released commit crime again within a year, while 80% of offenders are reoffenders. But the justice secretary said it's much harder to rehabilitate offenders with the prison system "permanently on the point of collapse". She was asked by Labour MP Clive Efford in the Commons last month how the government would reduce reoffending, which is "costing us £22 billion a year". Mahmood responded: "One of the problems of running a prison system at absolutely boiling hot, where you're permanently on the point of collapse... it means that within the prison estate you're not able to make much progress on the sorts of programmes that offenders would need to access to begin a rehabilitation journey." The Gauke review recommended introducing an 'earned progression model' inspired by reforms in Texas. Under the scheme, prisoners could be released earlier for good behaviour and be supervised on licence for a period of their sentence. They would then remain unsupervised in the community for the final period of their sentence, but could be recalled to prison if they commit another crime. Violent or sexual offenders who are serving sentences of four years or more could be released into the community on licence after spending half of their sentence behind bars, or longer if they do not comply with prison rules. The review also suggested for the most dangerous offenders on extended sentences to be eligible for parole at half-way through their sentence, instead of two-thirds, if they earn credits to take part in rehabilitation activities in prison. They would only be released if the Parole Board decided it was safe to do so.
