ADDICTS FIND SAFE HOUSE

Melbourne City Council has backed away from heroin 'shooting galleries',
but the concept is winning support in Germany.

TIM takes a swig from his bottle of orange juice, tightens his black
leather belt around his pock-marked arm, locates the vein and, for the
second time today, injects himself with heroin.

Sweating and swaying on his feet, the skinny 29-year-old gets up, puts on a
disposable glove and tidies up the detritus of drug addiction. The sterile
syringe, the little phial of salt solution, the alcohol swab and the
teaspoon go into a blue plastic bucket as Tim vacates the chair in front of
a mirror as if he has been to the barber's.

An attendant calls out "next" and another Frankfurt junkie sits down.

"It's great here, just like family," grins Tim before heading back on to
the streets to beg, steal or borrow the $135 he needs to finance his
two-grains-a-day habit.

"Here" is a three-storey terrace in Frankfurt's red light district where
dozens of the city's hard-drug addicts congregate every day. There are no
dealers, no drink, no soft, recreational drugs. There are doctors doling
out beakers of orange juice laced with methadone, a heroin substitute,
social workers advising the addicts and assistants supplying the sterilised
gear for drug injection.

"The people who come here are in much better physical and psychological
shape than they were before," says Wolfgang Barth, who runs the addicts'
centre. "Current drugs policy doesn't reach the homeless junkies, but here
you have a complete network of help."

With 4500 registered drug addicts and the real figure reckoned to be double
that, Frankfurt has long been Germany's narcotics capital and, since the
early 1990s, the city has played a pioneering role in treating addicts.
There are four city-run venues where addicts can shoot up without fear of
dirty needles, police harassment or hassle from dealers.

The controversial projects have been denounced by the political right as
encouraging rather than deterring drug-taking. The new centre-left
Government of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder last week signalled a change in
drugs policy by promising legislation "to make the Frankfurt model possible
legally".

Presenting the government program agreed to by his Social Democrat/Green
coalition, Schroeder was the first German Chancellor to talk about drug
dependence as having more to do with illness than with crime.

Responsibility for drugs policy is to be shifted from the Interior Ministry
to the Health Ministry in Bonn. A prominent politician from the Greens, who
have pushed liberalisation but failed to achieve a breakthrough on
decriminalising soft drugs, is to be appointed special government drugs
commissioner.

"It's a question of honestly confronting the problem," says Regina Ernst,
who has been working with addicts for 10 years and is in charge of the
Frankfurt project. "This city has been very consistent and radical in
breaking the taboos. Our policy is non-partisan and non-ideological. It's
pragmatic and hugely successful. We're in contact with 1000 addicts every
day."

Since the red light venues were introduced , drug-related deaths have
fallen by 80 per cent. Frankfurt police also report a substantial drop in
drug-related crime.