FDS Insight Newsletter Oct-Dec 2020

49 exposing my opponents publicly. Their promises weren’t just empty, in some cases they were deadly. At the end of the ’80s, many doctors had one or two patients in methadone treatment. In our shared practice in the Altstetterstrasse, Christian La Roche and I had up to 50 at any one time. Many city practices were overwhelmed by the enormous numbers of heroin- dependent people. So, we founded an association for low- risk drug use (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für risikoarmen Umgang mit Drogen, or Arud) and, in 1992, opened the first low-threshold methadone dispensary. We ignored the high-handed cantonal regulation that required proof of a failed withdrawal attempt before approving methadone treatment – for a limited time, and solely as an emergency measure aiding withdrawal. After Platzspitz was shut down in February 1992, the drug scene did not, of course, disappear. With truncheons, shields and tear gas, armed police continued to drive heroin users through downtown Zürich, even over the genteel Bahnhofstrasse. There, at the defunct Letten train station and under the Kornhaus Bridge, the police left them to their own devices, doing their best – in vain – to contain the drug scene there. Members of Albanian and Nigerian trafficking organizations directed their dealers from the Kornhaus Bridge. Customers would mill below, between defunct railroad tracks, in a morass of syringe packages, needles and excrement, searching for veins in the pale light of streetlamps. The district’s residences and schools degenerated. Families with children and means moved away. Access to emergency medical care and social work went backwards. Under the direction of Judge Barbara Ludwig, the same two or three hundred people were repeatedly ‘deported’ back to the wealthy Zürich suburbs or Aargau Canton and soon returned. The Letten district, Zürich’s last major public drug scene, was itself cleared on February 14, 1995. But this time the outcomes were different. In between the shut-downs of Platzspitz and Letten, better infrastructure to help heroin-dependent people had finally been installed. Photograph of Platzspitz by Gertrud Vogler. Adequately controlled agonist treatment The Arud low-threshold methadone dispensary model proved effective, and was soon copied throughout Switzerland. Richer communities were now able and obligated to tend to their own addicted children, taking pressure off the city’s care system. Over the years, blanket medical and social care has been developed.