In Paris, Anne Hidalgo wants to open four new sites for crack users

After decades of tinkering, will there finally be a lasting solution to solving the nagging crack problem in Paris? This is what Anne Hidalgo wants. In a letter sent on Monday August 30 to the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, the socialist mayor of Paris proposes to the State a first step, which would consist in opening in the capital four additional reception places for the consumers of this “drug of the poor ‘extremely addictive. Objective displayed: “Get these people out of the streets and out of their addiction. ”

Stalingrad, Barbès, Gare du Nord, La Chapelle … For thirty years, Parisian consumers of crack have been sent from one place to another, and find themselves wandering, day and night, in a small area in the North-East of Paris where the inhabitants can no longer take it. In May, the Town Hall and the State encouraged drug addicts to gather at night in a public park, the Jardins d’Eole, rather than in the streets and squares of the district. It was then a question of relieving the residents of the place of Stalingrad.

Then, at the end of June, the Town Hall, on the contrary, forbade the access of “crackers” to the Jardins d’Eole, so that the neighbors could find a little peace and normal use of their park. Since then, drug addicts no longer have a specific place to meet, but a large number of them camp in front of the park gates, to the dismay of the exasperated local residents. Violence is daily. “We are in an emergency situation, which worsened during the summer”, recognizes François Dagnaud, the mayor (Socialist Party) of the 19^e arrondissement.

A site reserved for women drug addicts

How to get out of it? For the left-wing elected officials at the head of Paris, the solution consists both in hardening the action of the police against drug trafficking and in better supporting consumers, by no longer concentrating them on a single site. The Town Hall wishes the constitution of a “Metropolitan crack support network”, with multiple locations, “Scattered throughout the territory of Greater Paris”, as Anne Hidalgo writes.

Without waiting for other municipalities to act, the City of Paris has identified four buildings which, in the capital, could accommodate crack addicts. Anne Hidalgo thus proposes “A site suitable for day-night reception and care activity” in the district of Pelleport (20^e arrondissement), two sites near the Grands Boulevards, at the limit of 10^e arrondissement and Paris Center, and a site in the 19^e borough which could be reserved for female drug addicts, “In order to fight against the specific violence to which they are subjected”.

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