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Transcript of the Governor's meet-the-media session
The following is a transcript of the meet-the-media session by the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, after his visit to the Women Treatment Centre of SARDA today (Wednesday).
Governor: As you may know I've been making a number of visits over recent months in association with the Beat Drugs Campaign which we've been making as comprehensive and effective as possible. Yesterday, we had figures on the number of drug abusers which were moderately encouraging. They showed a fall in the number of registered drug abusers in the early part of this year. But that's no reason for us being complacent or thinking that we can relax our campaign. The figures are still disturbing and within the overall figures there are particularly worrying figures for young women because the number of women drug abusers has unfortunately risen. So I was pleased today to be able to see the SARDA Drug Treatment and Rehabilitation Centre for young women here in Sha Tin.
The centre is doing an outstandingly good job and it has by international standards a very successful record in encouraging young women to abstain from drugs after they leave the centre. The problem we have at the moment is that the centre is pretty cramped and too small as some of you would have seen. So it's moving to new facilities in the North District later on this year and I hope that that will enable it to look after more young women and to achieve even more in the campaign to combat drug abuse here in Hong Kong.
The centre has been in this estate since 1988. It's, I think, played a useful role with community service that it's been carrying out in this estate. And I think you would have seen from the reactions of neighbours today that they've been very relaxed about having this centre here and know that when we have centres we can deal with the drug problem, when we don't have centres we can't deal with it. So I hope that residents in the North District will recognise that the centre is an addition to community services and will come and see what's happened here in Sha Tin if they want any reassurance about the establishment of the centre.
Question: Governor, there have been complaints that there are insufficient staff, social workers in the drug treatment centre, especially when they move to the new centre, that will increase to 50... They are very worrying about the number of staff. Do you think it's very necessary to increase the number of staff?