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Transcript of the Governor's media session
Following is the transcript of the media session given by the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten, after visiting PS 33 of the Hong Kong Christian Service, this (Thursday) afternoon:
Governor: Good afternoon. I'm delighted to have been able to visit PS 33 run by the Hong Kong Christian Service today. It's one of the major providers of counselling services for those who are abusing psychotropic substances and that has unfortunately been a growing problem among young people in Hong Kong. It's one of the more damaging parts of the drug problem that we are trying to address and that we have been trying to address more vigorously since my drug summit last March. We think the job that PS 33 is doing is a first-class one. We'll be providing them with more. resources in 1996-97 to do their job and we'll be opening a centre in the western New Territories for counselling psychotropic substance abusers. So I think that underlines our commitment to help this extremely important work. Today, we are publishing the third quarterly report on the progress that we've made with the schemes that we launched at my drug summit last year. And you'll see from that the very substantial achievements that we've notched up so far. But obviously there are still much to do. So we'll be holding a further drug summit in May, on May 23, when we can review progress during the first year, when we can see what we've achieved and when we can look at other things that are required and that the community will expect us to give priority to. Before then, we'll be going to the Finance Committee of LegCo with a bid for $350 million for our beat-drugs fund to support a range of new projects and development of existing projects which can all play a part in the campaign to beat drugs. It remains one of our foremost priorities. As I've said before, we want to stop Hong Kong being hit in the same way that other communities have been. We've got a difficult problem at the moment, but it's containable, and what we need to do is to drive the figures down and to make sure that everybody is united in trying to beat drugs. It's one of the most important things that we can do to ensure our young generation doesn't suffer in the way that the young are suffering in other communities.
Question: Legislators have complained that the meeting between them and John Major will be held behind closed doors. They're saying that it should be held in open. What is your comment...?
Governor: I don't think that many legislators have made that complaint. Which ones are you thinking of?
Question: There are several referred to.