FDS Insight Newsletter Oct-Dec 2020

48 apartment. Marie soon died of pneumonia. Gundula was an office worker. She also had an implanted catheter depot under the skin of her collar bone, into which she injected not only medication, but cocaine and sugar cocktails. Gundula had an ivy-entwined tattoo that read ‘For You: In Life and Death.’ She was HIV-positive. She worked up to the very end, in the office during the day, and doing sex work at night, on cocaine. She died of a bacterial valvular suppuration. Then there was Long-finger, a pianist. He came to my practice much later, but we knew each other from our wild youth, living together in Zürich’s Enge district. Ten pianists and one cellist shared the villa. The pianists lived in spacious salons, each with their own piano. I was the cellist; the nursery was enough for me. Of course, Long-finger had a different name back then. He was the youngest among us and lived with a beautiful older pianist of 21. She didn’t notice when he began to shoot up; when she did, she wanted to throw him out. Long-finger soon applied his sensitive fingers to breaking into drugstores. It took the police 12 years to catch him. Long-finger did not have HIV; he shot only the best, always using fresh needles. Wishing to avoid street heroin after his long prison term, he came to me for methadone treatment. I recognized him immediately but was surprised to hear he had been using heroin for so long – I had never known. Long-finger came at the right time because I was finally able to treat people with methadone. The cantonal physician had been forced, by a legal decision, to approve the treatment. With methadone, Long-finger’s life was saved. I also remember Annaliese, her twins and her husband Pino. I remember Marco, Mona, Bodo, E.T., Jösi, Lisa. Hundreds of stories of miserable death. Deadly promises, another Platzspitz For a long time, there was no effective medical treatment against HIV/AIDS. What was also truly unbearable was the torture heroin-dependent people suffered at the hands of the state. Even though methadone was a viable option to provide relief and reduce harm, it wasn’t a cure-all. Despite admitting in his early 1980s WHO assessment that methadone was an effective treatment for opioid addiction, Professor Uchtenhagen considered the methadone program a threat to his ultimate goal of permanent abstinence. All the way up to 1987, even terminally ill heroin users had to wait more than three months before being granted methadone treatment. For many, this came too late. They were already dead. Even now, in my older, supposedly milder days, I cannot hide my rage at the cluelessness and obstinate ignorance of our former health officials. I fought and won every dirty legal conflict with the health authorities. They were powerless to revoke my license and were obliged to grant me authorization for methadone treatment. Soon, I was a common media figure, taking pleasure in