A support centre for 5,000 drug and alcohol abusers is planned for the centre of Brighton.

It will be in an empty building on the corner of Ship Street and Ship Street Gardens.

Residents, shopkeepers and businesses, many of whom do not know the full extent of the project, have been invited to a meeting at the nearby Sussex Arts Club next Wednesday.

They claim the main parties involved in the project, Brighton and Hove Council, East Sussex, Brighton and Hove Health Authority and East Sussex Probation Service, have been keeping the proposals quiet.

The centre will bring drug and alcohol help services currently scattered around central Brighton, together.

It will be run by Addaction, which provides drug and alcohol services, including a needle exchange for hard drug users, and Community Alcohol Team Projects, which runs several schemes elsewhere in Sussex.

Addaction stresses it will be not prescribing drugs at the centre and its service will be mainly telephone counselling. It has not been decided whether a needle exchange service will be provided.

There will be 16 staff and 30 volunteers connected with the project.

The council gave planning permission for similar use for the building on a smaller scale to the organisation People and Churches Together. But it never moved in.

All the new and larger centre needs to become operational is a variation in the opening hours.

An application has been made to increase the opening hours so it can open from 10am to 6pm Monday to Friday, with late opening until 8pm on one of those days.

There is also an application to open from 10am to 1pm on Saturdays.

Residents and businesses have until

February 3 to object.

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