Drug consumption room
Drug consumption rooms , commonly known as shooting galleries , Giftraum , printing office , printing rooms or Gassenstübli called, are facilities that provide the facilities for a risk-minimizing, mostly intravenous drug use heroin , cocaine and their derivatives provide. This includes, for example, the provision of sterile syringes and the distribution of plasters, swabs, alcohol tips and sterile disposable gloves.
In order to curb infections with diseases caused by unclean drug consumption, drug consumption rooms offer users the opportunity to thoroughly wash and disinfect their hands and forearms before injecting drugs, which is also requested by the staff in the drug consumption rooms and is usually not possible outside of these is. As a rule, drug users can use all offers in the printing rooms free of charge. The possession of the substance brought with you for personal consumption is passively tolerated, so it is part of the accepting drug work . Many printing rooms are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
history
The world's first drug consumption room was built in Bern in 1986. In Zurich, where there was a large open drug scene, this path was followed in 1994 as part of a nationwide trial program.
In 1994 Germany's first drug consumption room was built in Hamburg .
The first fixer room in North America was built in Vancouver in 2003 under the name safe injection site . Amsterdam and Zurich served as models, whose experiences were obtained beforehand.
In Austria, there has been the first legal fixer room in Graz since 2009 , under the name Kontaktladen . So far, there have only been dispensaries for drug substitutes, for example on Karlsplatz in Vienna, which is considered the center of the Austrian drug scene.
Legal situation
In Germany , the term drug consumption room is defined by the Narcotics Act in Section 10a (1) BtMG:
- "[A facility] on the premises of which narcotics addicts are given an opportunity to consume non-medically non-prescribed narcotics they have brought with them".
Substance analysis is also prohibited in connection with the operation of a drug consumption room.
The actual consumption of narcotics is not prohibited, it is legally considered to be self-harm without penalty; the Narcotics Act does criminalize the cultivation, manufacture, trade, import, export, sale, sale, sale, placing on the market, acquisition, procuring or possession of narcotic drugs, but not consumption. According to the jurisprudence of German courts, it is possible (and without penalty) to consume narcotics without establishing possession of them.
Drug policy goal setting
The aims of the facilities are acute help in the event of a life-threatening overdose, avoidance of infectious diseases due to unsanitary conditions when consuming drugs, and the possibility of using drug help that is oriented towards acceptance to refer severely addicted persons to further help.
The non-drug-consuming population is also significantly relieved by drug consumption rooms, as the consumption of illegal, hard drugs in public, for example in parks, on the open street and in traffic stations, is falling. This in turn means that there are significantly less used syringe equipment, cut tin cans and other means to be found there, which are often used to consume drugs outside of drug consumption rooms despite the associated health risks. This also significantly reduces the associated risk of injury.
Political Debates
The Narcotics Control Council (INCB) of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has for years viewed the establishment of drug consumption rooms as a violation of UN conventions on psychotropic substances. In May 2003, a high-ranking INCB commission visited the drug consumption room in Münster for the first time . These facilities, as well as the drug study for opiate-assisted treatment (substitution of original substances , dispensing of heroin), remain controversial in the German drug policy . Critics point to the incompatibility of a repressive drug policy with the promotion of drug use, while proponents cite the falling drug death rate and the conditions of illegal use as reasons.
In terms of legal policy, the structure of the passive toleration of narcotic possession gives rise to a number of unanswered questions. The principle of legality obliges police officers to regularly investigate a criminal offense. This also applies to the possession of narcotics for personal consumption, even if a discontinuation of the procedure is to be expected. However, since repressive behavior by the police is incompatible with the low-threshold approach of a drug consumption room in the same place, the state permit regulations oblige the police to actively ignore, provided that it only concerns the sphere of possession for personal consumption.
Drug consumption rooms worldwide
Today (2009) there are 18 fixed rooms in Switzerland , 16 each in Germany and the Netherlands, and since 2003 two in Vancouver, the only one in Canada, and one in Luxembourg . Other drug consumption room projects exist in Australia , Norway and Austria .
Germany
There are currently licensing regulations for the operation of drug consumption rooms in the following federal states:
Berlin , Hamburg , Hesse , Lower Saxony , North Rhine-Westphalia and Saarland .
The establishment of drug consumption rooms in Germany has been scientifically monitored in many cases so that statements can be made about the effects. However, the specific effects depend on the specific design of the respective drug consumption room (e.g. integration into the other structures of drug work and social work, location, situation of the local drug scene, etc.).
The following experiences were made in Berlin:
- The acceptance of drug consumption rooms in the residential area was relatively high with 70 to 80 percent approval. The main reason cited was that the expansion of the scene load near the consumption rooms (which was feared many times beforehand) was avoided.
- The number of users of the drug consumption rooms was relatively small and accounted for around 15 percent of the estimated users of hard drugs. It was also not possible to address new users who had not been covered by previous drug work.
- The users primarily cite health-related content and medical treatments as benefits. In addition, a third of the users stated that they had been motivated to take up further help.
Switzerland
The world's first drug consumption room was built in 1986 in Münstergasse in Bern and still exists today.
The first drug consumption room was opened in Zurich in 1994. There, the strategy of repression and displacement, tried and tested for decades, was continued in order to eradicate the drug scene. The repressive drug policy was introduced after 1968, with the result that the drug scene was repeatedly driven from place to place: from the Odeon, the Riviera, the Bunker, the Hirschenplatz, Stadelhofen and from the Autonomous Youth Center (Fixerraum). From 1986, the scene finally settled at Platzspitz , a park right next to the main train station in the center of the city, which was soon nicknamed Needlepark . The drug addicts traveled from all over Switzerland and also from abroad, the scene reached a size of up to 1,500 people, including about 200 to 300 drug dealers. The city was overwhelmed and "felt that the rest of Switzerland had left it alone with its problem" . Drug support facilities for medical care, which also dispensed sterilized syringes, as well as methadone programs were set up to curb impoverishment and AIDS infections.
After the park was closed and evicted, the scene settled in the area under the Kornhausbrücke at Letten train station , where drug waste began to pile up. These images went around the world and put the Zurich politics, which had to lose its image as a financial metropolis, under further pressure. According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , images of the open drug scene “haunted the world as images of horror in the first half of the nineties” . The responsible authorities in Zurich were forced to "gather" together to look for new ways of dealing with the drug scene. The result was the introduction of accepting drug work , which resulted in the establishment of the first fix rooms, rooms in which heroin was injected under supervision.
literature
- Sebastian Poschadel among others: Evaluation of the work of drug consumption rooms in the Federal Republic of Germany. Final report on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Health. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2003, ISBN 3-8329-0073-X .
Web pages
- Drug Konsumraum.net , website of the German AIDS Help
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Renate Künzi: 20 years of Fixerstübli: people are drug addicts too swissinfo, September 16, 2006 (accessed March 20, 2009)
- ↑ Thomas Gerber: Zurich has Europe's largest open drug scene. In: Berliner Zeitung . September 7, 1994, accessed June 16, 2015 .
- ↑ http://www.freiraum-hamburgev.de/ ( Memento from August 31, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Difficulties in Paradise. Vancouver's problems with Downtown Eastside. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . September 25, 2007, accessed June 16, 2015 .
- ^ Caritas Graz-Seckau ( Memento from September 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ a b Michael Simoner: Fixed rooms recognized and controversial. In: The Standard . March 3, 2009, p. 11 , accessed June 16, 2015 .
- ↑ § 29 Narcotics Act
- ↑ Final report of the evaluation in Berlin , July 2005 ( Memento from July 31, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 598 kB)
- ↑ a b c From confrontation to cooperation. The long, arduous path of the Zurich drug policy. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . March 12, 2001, accessed June 16, 2015 .