The watchword is clear: “No to crack”, “No to consumption or rest rooms in inhabited areas”. Saturday October 2, nearly twenty associations of residents who, in different districts of Paris, fear the opening of places for drug addicts below their homes are organizing a first joint event, Place de Stalingrad (19e arrondissement), the historic epicenter of crack traffic in the capital. They hope to bring together 600 to 1,000 people.
“We are not opposed to theaters, but we must not open them next to schools, housing, or shops”, pleads Delphine Martin, president of an association of the 10e arrondissement. Rudolph Granier is more brutal: “Shooting rooms are not a solution, asserts this elected (Les Républicains, LR) from Paris who intends to demonstrate on Saturday. You don’t treat people by helping them to take drugs. ”
Create a network of places for crack users, get them out of the streets and then perhaps out of addiction by welcoming them in a dozen small structures scattered around the capital. After thirty years of public powerlessness, a pattern begins to emerge to resolve the issue of crack in Paris. In recent weeks, specialists, medico-social associations, the City of Paris and the State are more or less on the same line.
But will the project come to fruition? Nothing certain, so much the opening of places for drug addicts meets resistance. Starting with the hostility of certain neighbors, relayed by part of the right.
Dry up the source
Aware of the difficulty, the City of Paris has just reviewed its plan. Rather than creating new rooms here and there and clashing with local residents, “We immediately favor the use of spaces in hospitals, as well as structures that already accommodate drug addicts, and can be adapted”, explains Emmanuel Grégoire, Anne Hidalgo’s first assistant. The Ministry of Health is to propose ad hoc places shortly. The other rooms will come after.
In Paris, the crack problem is nagging. These cakes, composed of cocaine for a large half, an analgesic (phenacetin) and an antiparasitic (levamisole) for the rest, appeared in France in the 1980s. Since then, a small market has taken root in the north-east of the capital, and a little in Seine-Saint-Denis.
“Transactions mainly take place in public spaces (streets, parks, metro stations, train stations) or in squats or slums, where traffickers and certain users coexist, due to a very strong dependence on the product generating the need to consume and re-consume on the spot ”, according to the table painted by the National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm) in January.
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