Hacker News Reader

Comment by formol | Hacker News Reader

The very lefty mayor of Paris launched one « safe site » in the city. Results : disneyland for drug dealers and addicts in the area, dead people (OD) in the street, noise, fights...

View on HN

This comment shows two things, 1. how projects like this will always be blamed for quality of life problems in the area, and how 2. the problems of street people and drug addicts are often much more complex and rooted in previous political clusterfucks.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the Gare du Nord was the main place that people smugglers would assist people in travelling from France to the UK. At the time you could walk onto a Eurostar without having your papers checked by a British border police (only French passport control, who tolerated migrants travelling to the UK with false papers).

Lots of desperate and often penniless people pitched up around that area. People smuggling was linked to other forms of criminality, including prostitution and robbery by people trying to get the money to make the trip to the UK.

When the border protocol changed, the main staging points for migrants moved to Calais. But that part of Paris remained a centre for migrants to meet and connect. It also remained a centre of street dealing, robbery, other forms of low-level crime like selling fake bags, scams and snatching. It is notorious for street harassment, mainly of women. As far as I can tell, there isn't a particular overlap between people doing this and hard drug addicts.

In practice, most cities have somewhere you go to buy drugs on the street in the middle of the night. No-one wants to be that area, but trying to get it to be somewhere else doesn't really solve the problem. There are lots of things which can make this type of area less upsetting for people who have to work, live and travel through it, safe injection sites might certainly be a part of this.

Source: have lived in Paris and travelled there extensively over last 20+ years. My friend was an asylum seeker in the UK who got the Eurostar from Paris.

As a counterpoint, the Medically Supervised Injecting Room in Kings Cross (Sydney) has quite radically transformed the area for the better - people who used to live there before it opened tell of sometimes walking over the bodies of addicts who'd OD'd on the streets, and of seeing used syringes everywhere. Now, you'd hardly ever see these things.

(I'd link to the Wikipedia article, but it seems to be the subject of an edit war between a couple of groups with agendas to push, so is best ignored.)

I don't know much about the site in Paris but I do have experience living nearby Vancouver's first of now two safe injection sites. In my experience what you describe did not happen in Vancouver. Safe injection sights save lives by providing a clean, safe place to minimize harm.

That's Vancouver. Even the druggies are reasonably civilized.

Not sure if your comment is snide or just humourously dismissive. The homeless, drug addiction and mental health issues experienced in Vancouver, especially in the DTES are very real, and very serious. I don't think Vancouver's homeless population is significantly different than Paris'.

Glad to hear Canada apparently has a good reputation abroad.

Don't we already have all of those problems though? Or is this saying this increased those issues? If so I'd love to see the data, maybe it can provide some lessons for SF as it experiments with this.

Sources for this would be very helpful. Always interested in alternative viewpoints!

Here is a recent study of drug consumption room programs across Europe (including the one in Paris), and their impact so far. http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/topics/pods/drug-consumption-roo...

Their analysis seems pretty balanced, and seems to skew positive. It definitely contradicts the negative comment you're responding to.

The truthiness of that comment can be pretty safely derived from the derisive word "lefty".

I've never seen sources backing up what he says. According to this source results are positive in term of reducing consumption in streets and syringes found in streets. It also allowed to diagnose users with transmissible diseases and provide treatments.

Neighbours of the injection site do complain of increase disturbance in the area but it seems due to the fact that it's the only site in Paris.

Since the one opened in Paris, another one opened in Strasbourg and one is gonna open in Bordeaux this year

http://mobile.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2017/10/12/premiere...

There must be a lot more data from sites in Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland that has been opened for much longer.

Sources are very hidden : first result page on google (I'm talking for french people)

http://www.bfmtv.com/police-justice/paris-emotion-apres-la-m...

http://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75010/paris-le-cri-d-alarme-d...

https://www.google.fr/search?q=riverains+salle+de+shoot&sour...

to sum up : the neighbours are very unhappy about it. The area was already largely insecure, though (heaven of crack-heads).

I don't think the principle of safe site is bad, but it needs a good management team because - by definition - you can't expect any well disciplined behaviour from drug addicts.

I recommend the rue de Maubeuge. It's just miserable, always a few crackheads hanging around and dealing or whatever. In one article [0], I read that the police deliberately don't act there. The videosurveillance is broken atm anyways.

Maybe the nurses and the psychological aid they can freely ask for in the shooting room will save these poor souls so we don't need the police to intervene. But I go by everyday and there's no diminution.

[0] https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1463153023-drogue-paris-cr...

It's interesting, I never heard about such results before (and I live in Paris). Would you care to share some links for further reading?

I'm also curious to know why and how the political orientation of the mayor is relevant?

There's a safe site in Geneva (quai 9) near the train station, and none of the effects describe can be seen there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com