Melbourne's war on drugs has seen many a battle, and the battle raging in north Richmond has been bloodier than most.

Once Mr O'Donnell had bought his fix, he wandered around the corner to Little Lithgow Street.

In the gutter there, he became another casualty.

The 27-year-old died of a heroin overdose, and his mother, Loretta Gabriel, now hopes it was not in vain.

Mr O'Donnell was part of the tide of deaths that forced the state government to change its position and support a trial of a safe injecting room in north Richmond.

He was waiting for placement in drug rehabilitation and had spent the last seven weeks of his life in a private mental health treatment clinic where he had not used heroin.

"People are dying and it's out of control and leadership was needed, and it was needed now, because it could be anyone's child," Ms Gabriel said.

"I was really surprised, elated, astonished, it's given me so much comfort... and I'm just so grateful for the other parents out there who now will have this available.

"Sam had all the hallmarks of why there needed to be a safe injecting room."

Carl Francoli, Mr O'Donnell's grandfather, misses the artistic and hard-working young man, and knows the centre will not save every addict.

But he hopes it makes seeking treatment easier.

"When he tried to get help it was sometimes just begrudging and awkward, or just wasn't available," he said.

Richmond residents like Judy Ryan see deaths like Mr O'Donnell's every day.

She did not know the woman slumped on the Victoria Street footpath last May, or the man crying and screaming for help nearby. Like many of the heroin addicts who came to Richmond to shoot up, they were from out of town.

"You just never get over it. A stranger. There she was, dead on the footpath," says Ms Ryan, secretary of Victoria Street Drug Solutions, a community organisation that has campaigned for a safe injecting room for the past year.

The weeping man - the dead woman's partner, it turned out - told her they'd shot up in the Lithgow Street public toilets. "We like to call that place the 'unsupervised injecting centre'," Ms Ryan says.

Paramedics came, but the woman couldn't be revived. "I just turned to the paramedics and said, this is Melbourne, this is insane," Ms Ryan says.

But it's a common sight here in Melbourne's heroin rectangle, locals say. Many residents say they've had to call ambulances - or perform urgent CPR - on unconscious addicts. Paramedics talk of dashing from overdose to overdose, racing the clock to deliver a shot of naloxone.

Ms Ryan tries to care for addicts when she sees them, if they will let her. But the human wastage still angers her. "We get angry, absolutely. We're not Mother Teresas here."

Wednesday is All Saints' Day, a day for remembering saints and martyrs. At Richmond Uniting Church, the families that have lost a loved one to drug abuse will come to light a candle.

Ms Ryan will be there, to light a candle for her nephew Rick, and one for the woman who died in front of her earlier this year.

She estimates 34 people have overdosed in the area this year - no, she corrects herself, 35. Another man died Monday night.

A mural on a concrete wall in Little Charles Street records some of their names. Rick, her nephew. And Mr O'Donnell.

Ms Ryan runs her hand across the rough concrete. 'YOU TALK WE DIE', the mural says.

The announcement of the supervised injecting room has left mixed emotions in those who fought so hard to establish it; celebration, tempered with a sense of mourning for all those for whom this centre has come too late.

At North Richmond Community Health, where a needle exchange hands out about 90,000 syringes a month and where the centre will be built, the workers cried when they heard the announcement.

"Vicarious trauma," one staff member termed it.

Kasey Elmore, the centre's alcohol and other drugs program manager, thinks about 50 clients a year die from overdoses. Many come to the centre for years and become close friends with staff.

"I feel really sad for the ones we lost," she said. "But hopefully now no more families have to suffer the loss of a loved one."