France's first supervised injection site (SIJ) for hard drug users will open in Paris by this fall, local officials announced Thursday. It will be located near the Gare du Nord train station, an area of open hard drug use and sales and petty crime.
The project is "aimed at reducing the number of people taking drugs in the street, in common areas of apartment buildings and other areas such as car parks," added deputy mayor Myriam El Khomri. The area would be given a boosted police presence, she added, to prevent dealers from selling their wares in the proximity.
While supervised injection sites are a proven harm reduction measure, local officials were downplaying that aspect and instead highlighting the public order and safety effects. That could be a bid to blunt opposition and hostility from local residents' associations, who have said they fear the SIJ would further degrade the area, described as "an open air drug market."
While this will be the first SIJ in the City of Light, Paris already has a needle exchange program. It handed out more than 300,000 syringes last year, half of them in the Gare du Nord.
SIJs already operate in a number of European countries, include Germany and Switzerland, as well as Australia and Canada.
Comments
Best way to keep it from
Best way to keep it from being "an open air drug market?" Sell the drugs in a store!
Hm…drug stores. Who'd have ever thought of that? I wonder if such things have ever been tried? Has anyone ever heard of drug stores?
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