Crack in Paris: Anne Hidalgo asks Gérald Darmanin to put an end to “a large open-air market”

The socialist mayor (PS) of Paris, and presidential candidate of 2022, Anne Hidalgo, went, Tuesday, September 21 in the evening, in front of the gardens of Eole, in the 19^e district of the capital, where there were more than a hundred drug addicts; she challenged the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. “This situation has lasted too long”, said the elected to Agence France-Presse (AFP), arriving rue Riquet.

Crack consumers have been living there since, in mid-May, the Prefecture of Police and the Town Hall agreed to group them together in the northern part of the Eole Gardens in order to relieve the neighboring district of Stalingrad.

But at the end of June, Anne Hidalgo had decided to put an end to this temporary situation by prohibiting crack users from entering the park, so that residents could again frequent it.

“It had a perverse effect: they gathered outside”, recognized the city councilor, but “The fact of leaving a large open-air crack market in the total tolerance of the police authorities, it is not acceptable”, she added for Prefect Didier Lallement. “I appeal to the Minister of the Interior” to adjust the “Security problem” in this district in the north of Paris, said the mayor, denouncing a “Absolutely unacceptable situation”.

The Prefecture evokes a “very sustained police action”

At midday, the Prefecture of Police had responded to repeated criticism.^me Hidalgo. “The sector of Stalingrad and Eole continues more than ever to be the object of a very sustained police action”, she said in a press release.

Surrounded by the mayors (PS) of the 18^e and 19^e districts, a few assistants and municipal agents, Anne Hidalgo then went to meet a handful of residents and drug addicts, stopping just in front of the latter’s encampment.

“Crack, it dissociates you, it brings you lower than the ground”, said a young woman who has been staying for eight months in a hotel. “I spent four years in the street, sometimes walking barefoot, sometimes hitting for ten, five euros because I was completely addicted”, she said.

“At home, there are a lot of people who have gone to the hospital; they came back “another woman told him, while Mr.^me Hidalgo considers healthcare establishments as ” a track “ faced with the refusal of residents to see treatment rooms set up near their homes.

Some residents spoke with the mayor, others questioning her in a more hostile manner. “We want an evacuation”, claimed Kamel, a resident of the neighborhood, while Mr.^me Hidalgo refuses the Prefecture de Police’s proposal to evacuate crack users to the Porte de La Villette; she favors a ” sustainable solution “ which consists, for her, in the multiplication of small reception structures.