FDS Insight Newsletter Oct-Dec 2020

45 addicted and simply shifted their businesses to wherever the police currently were not. New and younger customers were found in these locations, rapidly expanding the market. Finally, the police resigned to the inevitable and turned a blind eye, for five years, to the Platzspitz drug bazaar. By the mid-’80s, AIDS fatalities were no longer limited to the most marginalized populations. Initially, no one knew much about the new disease, who it affected and how. But it soon became clear that unprotected sex and unsafe injection were the main driving forces. At that time, 80-90 percent of injecting drug users who sought medical help had the virus. Switzerland had more HIV-infected citizens than anywhere else in Western Europe. Fear and anxiety were logical consequences, but they often escalated into panic. Our society became afflicted with suspicion and hate. Regulars at the local bar, but also members of Parliament, cried out for branding infected people with tattoos, or even isolating them in concentration camps. Some gay people, having finally seen some easing of homophobia, were horrified at the thought of now being ‘lumped together’ with drug users. Fortunately, rationality would eventually win out over this poisonous atmosphere. Initially, however, only those drug users who agreed to abstinence were given help. Those who were unwilling were denied guidance and medical care. Cold turkey, without any form of sedative or soothing support, was torture – agonizing pain throughout the body, uncontrollable shivering, diarrhea, terror. Heroin-dependent people on turkey, wearing fluttering hospital gowns and pushing their IV poles with one hand, a cigarette in the other, could sometimes be seen racing downtown to find a fix to deliver them. Neither police, nor threats, nor even the prospect of death could dissuade them. In 1983 and ‘84, I was an emergency doctor in Zürich. People would come in from the Sihl riverbed, where they lived in huts rigged of cardboard and tin. One had festering wounds on his fingers and legs. Was it a cocaine- induced necrosis, or epidemic typhus from rat bites? Back then, it often felt like guesswork. And then there was the brand-new HIV/AIDS, to boot. In 1984, my friend and fellow physician Andreas Roose and I began voluntarily touring the city’s shelters, where HIV-contaminated needles were passed around like joints. The danger was obvious and acute. Shelter workers and the private youth aid organization ZAGJP (Zürich Consortium for Youth Problems) helped us to spread lifesaving information and resources, distributing sterile syringes. But Emilie Lieberherr, a Social Democratic Councilmember and director of Zürich’s social services, who suspected trouble from leftist intrigues, wanted to forbid the distribution of clean injection supplies in her institutions. We countered that we had prescribed the distribution for medical reasons. Lieberherr then appealed to the