FDS Insight Newsletter Oct-Dec 2020

43 One evening, Sidi was sitting in front of the TV, watching the evening news. Üse was lying on the mattress next to him in the flickering blue shadows. Sidi suddenly noticed that not only had Üse stopped talking, he had also stopped breathing. Sidi switched on the lights. Üse was blue in the face. Sidi applied CPR according to every rule in the book, the whole, horrid time thinking of the tabloid headlines: ‘Junkie Dead, Doctor Sat and Watched.’ Well, that didn’t happen. Üse survived, and made it to the hospital. But according to the grapevine, he died of AIDS 10 years later. Shortly after that fateful evening, Sidi completed his medical studies. The author as a young doctor in the 1980s. Photograph by André Seidenberg. Sidi, that’s me. I was a doctor for 40 years, practicing in Zürich, Switzerland. Nearly half of the city’s heroin-dependent people visited my practice at least once. I must have seen about three-and-a-half thousand. Some of them came again and again over the years. Many simply called me Sidi. History in the fading It was in 1992 that the Platzspitz city park (pictured top) – right by Zürich train station and internationally nicknamed ‘Needle Park’ – was cleared out by the police, who had previously tolerated drug use and sales there. This was eventually followed, however, by a far more enlightened policy. My friend and colleague Peter Grob calls that ‘history in the fading.’ I can’t just sit back and let that fading happen. Back then, in Switzerland alone, twice as many people died each year of overdose and AIDS as have died from terror attacks in all of Europe since 2010. The horrors and death were on our streets, right in front of our eyes. Switzerland found itself at a crossroads, and chose to take the path of careful consideration instead of ostracization, incarceration and destruction of fellow human beings. From the mid-1990s, we vastly expanded syringe services and methadone access, and also permitted the limited prescribing of heroin – a policy with many well-studied benefits, which spawned a number of imitators around the world. The success of Swiss drug policy exemplifies the liberal, humane side of Switzerland. I believe this is still important now, for Switzerland and elsewhere. Any society refusing to integrate its marginalized members is a looming danger to itself. Take the overdose crisis in the USA. And the catastrophe in many regions of the former Soviet Union, of which far