The ‘huge backlog’ of people waiting for a public bed for drug and alcohol treatment in Victoria

Victorians with a drug or alcohol problem are struggling to access publicly-funded addiction treatment beds as waiting times blow out because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Beating dependency is often a two-step process: weaning off the substance at a residential withdrawal clinic, before learning how to live without it at a rehabilitation facility.

One of the state’s biggest residential withdrawal clinics, Uniting ReGen at Ivanhoe, in Melbourne’s…