FDS Insight Newsletter Oct-Dec 2020

44 fewer people are aware. Then there’s Iran, where so many people are drug- dependent, suffering from tuberculosis, AIDS and hepatitis. On February 5, 1992, police cordoned off and closed Platzspitz. For years, neglected, destitute people – as well as regular Joes and well-groomed staffers from the international finance district directly behind the train station – had obtained their drugs there. Every day, more than 2,000 people were estimated to buy heroin and cocaine, and another thousand cannabis or other drugs, and many lived at the park. People openly sold drugs, shot up, conducted sex work and not rarely – thanks to unsafe practices and contaminated supplies – died there. Nowadays, when an aged Sidi takes his dog for a walk in Platzspitz Park, he sees the ghosts of back then. I’m overcome with sadness as I recall desperate people lying on the carousel in deepest winter, day and night at sub- zero temperatures, wrapped in thick blankets. Peter Grob, working for the HIV prevention organization ZIPP-AIDS, would distribute sterile needles in the public toilet building. I remember the jostling crowds in front of the hand-in counter. I gaze over at the stone bench by the Sängerdenkmal (Singer’s Memorial). The same guy would sit there all the time, his pants around his ankles, searching with a needle for a living blood vessel in his inner thigh. Filterlifixers, people who provided cigarette filters for use in preparing heroin, would bring over shopping carts from the train station. They would set up a stolen construction plank, laid over the cart, as a shop counter. Their wares included spoons to hold the ‘brown sugar’ (contaminated street heroin, mixed with ascorbate or lemon juice) as it bubbled over a candle’s flame, belts, water and the odd disinfectant – but most of all, those new and used cigarette filters. The reward for the filterlifixers’ efforts was the residual heroin in filters. You could get a fairish shot from 10 or 20 filters. Without exception, the filterlifixers I knew got HIV and hepatitis C. But how had we got there? A poisonous atmosphere At the end of the ’60s, for the first time, two full-time police officers were assigned exclusively to drug-related offenses in Zürich; 25 years later, there were hundreds in the city, fighting the War on Drugs. Drugs were the major reason for incarceration in Switzerland. As of 1967, drug users were banished from every nook and cranny of the city. Dozens of restaurants, bars and clubs were closed – Schwarzer Ring, Odeon, Blow-up, to name just a few. Armed police cleared squares and parks all over the city, patrolling them for days or weeks to prevent people from returning. Riviera, Bellevue, Seepromenade and Hirschenplatz were repeatedly subjected to this senseless routine. No matter. The small-time sellers, mostly addicted themselves, stayed