GUTEN TAG! FROM DRUGTOPIA

In Frankfurt, Germany, addicts' lives are well managed and nicely
appointed. Is this the direction Vancouver should go?

By Frances Bula Vancouver Sun Nov. 25, 2000

What are we to think about our never-ending drug problem? You could
try doing away with drugs -- and hey, lots of luck. But wouldn't it be
nice if there were a place where drugs weren't such a problem? A town
where the muss and fuss was cleaned and contained? Somewhere, say,
like Frankfurt, Germany?

This sober-sided banking capital, of all places, has become the golden
city for politicians and policy wonks around the world. It beckons
like a desert mirage to all those cities where the drug wave has
overwhelmed and defeated traditional strategies. Here in besieged
Vancouver the idea of Frankfurt as drugtopia is particularly strong.
In 1998 concerned locals brought the German city's drug czar over to
share some of his Teutonic wisdom. It was Vancouver city social
planner Don MacPherson's visit there in 1999 that kickstarted a move
at Vancouver city hall to more fully embrace the harm-reduction approach.

This summer, city councillor Jennifer Clarke paid a visit, coming back
with a report that said the Frankfurt model worked, but partly because
the police and city had special powers that Vancouver doesn't. One
week ago, yet another delegation made the pilgrimage and came away
impressed enough that, just yesterday, some of their number announced
they are ready to launch their own pilot safe-injection sites, and the
mayor and his glacially moving drug initiatives be damned.

Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Frankfurt. Many people believe the German city
is 10 years down the road Vancouver will have to follow if it is ever
to reclaim its Downtown Eastside core. Just as many others warn that,
at best, Frankfurt's realities are so different that as a model it is
practically useless, and, at worst, its cooly pragmatic approach is
unacceptable on moral grounds.

So what constitutes the approach that has come to be called the
Frankfurt Way?

[continued at http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1756.a02.html ]