In a letter addressed to Prime Minister Jean Castex on Monday, August 30, Paris Mayor PS Anne Hidalgo, who had committed to opening this summer the first place of specific care for crack users in the capital, offers several possible sites.
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“It is past time to open additional care facilities that will allow these people to get off the streets and away from their dependence,” insists the mayor, who presented “four solutions” to elected officials, associations, and northeast residents. On Monday evening, Parisian attended a new meeting on the subject.
Anne Hidalgo, for example, offers “a site suitable for day/night reception and a care activity” in the 20th arrondissement, which will be “operational before the end of the year,” two sites in the Grands Boulevards district, one of which will be operational before the end of the year, and a site for women drug addicts in the 19th arrondissement.
According to the mayor, the opening of these sites will help to “long-term solve the crack problem” in Paris, which is symbolized by the daily gathering of drug addicts on rue Riquet since access to the Eole gardens, near Stalingrad, was banned at the end of June.
Anne Hidalgo has been advocating for the establishment of new drug-addiction reception centres that combine care, housing, and consumption areas for several months. The right-wing opposition, for its part, is opposed to lowering risk consumption rooms (SCMR) known as “shooting rooms,” a term refuted by the elected socialist.
At the beginning of June, the office of Health Minister Olivier Véran declared the results of two structures of this type tested in Paris and Strasbourg since 2016 to be positive and stated that they wanted to perpetuate these devices in common law, despite the fact that the experimentation was only planned until 2022.
The possible PS presidential candidate also proposes expanding the hours of care as well as care and services in the eight drug-addiction reception centres that are already open in the 18th arrondissement.
The mayor of the capital, who also calls for the creation of equivalent places in other municipalities of Greater Paris, asks the Prime Minister to “finance these medico-social devices.”
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As a result, it calls for a significant increase in the judicial police’s means to combat cocaine and its derivatives trafficking (…), to dismantle supply networks, and to combat associated crime.
