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Assist Drug Users in Heart of Zurich : Swiss Try Radical Approach in Fighting AIDS

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Reuters

These days even the newcomer to Switzerland’s most opulent city knows where to get a fix and shoot up in peace.

Since the start of the year Zurich has set aside a zone where small-time drug dealing and taking are unofficially tolerated and monitored by medical services.

Switzerland has the highest rate of acquired immune deficiency syndrome in Europe, and Zurich, the country’s biggest drug-center, had to find a radical way to stop drug users from spreading the disease.

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However, a wave of drug-related crime--culminating in a grisly murder--threatens to intrude on a population that would rather be left to high finance and art-dealing.

Zurich’s junkies gather every day around a disused iron bandstand on the Platzspitz--a spit of parkland bounded by two rivers but only 200 yards from the city’s shopping and banking quarter--to peddle, cook fixes and inject.

Syringes Exchanged

In a converted public toilet, volunteers exchange fresh syringes for used ones, dispense sterile wipes and condoms and chat to the endless line of addicts at the window.

Swapping syringes helps cut needle-sharing, one of the sure-fire ways to transmit AIDS. Authorities estimate Zurich has up to 800 carriers.

The volunteers distribute 6,000 needles a day.

As a result, for most citizens the once-beloved park has become a no man’s land, its name transformed into “Platzspritz” or “Needle Park.” The tabloid Blick now refers to it as “Zurich’s Drug Hell.”

While the city and federal governments approved funds for syringes and medical care for the addicts, police say this undermines the law.

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Futility of Punishment

Drug taking and dealing are strictly illegal, although a federal commission has acknowledged the futility of punishment and called for both to be legalized if the quantities are small.

“We do not tolerate dealing . . . . The clear task of the police is to enforce the law. That goes from hashish to hard drugs,” Arthur Grob, second-in-command of Zurich’s drug police, told Reuters. “But the open drugs scene has political support through the help given on the Platzspitz.”

The city police say the park attracts drug tourism from all over Switzerland and Europe, with an inevitable rise in crime.

“The Platzspitz is a magnet for people from all over . . . . There’s been an increase in all crime from pickpocketing to burglary and robbery, much of it directly linked to drugs,” Grob said.

Lack of Resources

He accepts there is little point in arresting small-time addicts. But many users sell to finance their habit, and police say they would arrest and charge all dealers if it weren’t for the lack of resources.

They would like the park cleared and the addicts dispersed. Every two weeks or so they raid the park, sealing off the area and checking the identity of everyone there. But they detain only suspected criminals on a wanted list.

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The contradiction between the strategies of police and the city council is evident. “It’s politically very hard to carry out a raid when soup is just being dished out,” Grob said.

The volunteers have protested against the police raids.

“The drugs are injected too quickly out of fear. The incidence of respiratory and heart stoppages is mounting,” one action group said in a protest letter.

Breakthrough in Treatment

The volunteers, who staff a bus where the junkies can socialize, argue the park is a breakthrough in treating addicts as human beings.

However, Platzspitz doctor Claude Bossy admits: “Yes, there are fights, rapes, murders. The drug Mafia are never far away.”

The dividing line between life and death is thin on the Platzspitz.

During a Reuter interview with Bossy an addict ran into the van to say another addict had overdosed and fallen unconscious.

When the doctors reached the woman with an oxygen mask, she was shuddering violently, slumped on a bench, her eyes glazed. But repeated coaxing and mentions of her name penetrated the stupor and brought a hint of a nod.

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She was lucky and did not need resuscitating, as one or two addicts do every day.

Difficulty of Treatment

Bossy explained the difficulty of treating overdoses when addicts have AIDS and suffer from a range of disorders that their immune systems cannot fend off.

Business at the bandstand had not stopped.

At messy tables some addicts offer a service to others--new syringes, a spoon and a flame for dissolving the small brown cubes of heroin in water and gauze pads to filter the impure drug solution.

They keep the gauzes. Their fee is the residue that, after ten or so filtrations, is enough for a fix.

Just across the park, visitors to the stately neo-Gothic National Museum have a good view of the proceedings as they sip tea in its courtyard.

Putting Problem Out of Sight

Grob sees the desire to put the drug problem out of sight as one factor behind the establishment of the Platzspitz.

“Everyone says, help them, yes. But not in my neighborhood.”

Bossy adds: “The politicians weren’t unhappy to have them all somewhere where they aren’t so conspicuous.”

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But both admit bringing the “scene” into the open might make it easier for the first-time user to start taking drugs.

An evaluation now in progress will show if costs to the city of about $600,000 a year are helping to stop the spread of AIDS.

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