Les Jardins d ‘Eole in the 18th arrondissement of Paris will no longer be open to drug addicts at night. The park was evacuated last night. The mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo visited the site on Wednesday.
“I got involved with the borough mayors. I said that on June 30, this garden would come back to the inhabitants and families“. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo kept her promise. The Jardins d’Eole were evacuated last night by the police.
Evacuation of the Eole Gardens
In order to relieve the residents of the Stalingrad district, crack users had free access to this park in the evening since mid-May. The public garden was open to them until 1 a.m. The tensions in the streets of the district and the climate of insecurity had not, however, diminished. Last Saturday, drug addicts were targeted by mortar fire and one person arrested.
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This morning, on site, Anne Hidalgo announced that the entrance to the park would now be filtered. The mayor of Paris also wants to want to “occupy the ground” this summer by organizing cultural activities, sports or picnics with a view to removing consumers and dealers.
The inhabitants of the district remain nevertheless worried. “Since May 17, this park had become the nighttime retreat for drug addicts. Our biggest fear now is that the 300 crack users and drug dealers will take to the streets for lack of a specific place to go. Today on this question we have no answers“, worries a resident at the microphone of France 3 Paris IDF.
The Collectif 19, which alerted to the situation in the neighborhood, welcomed “this first step” : “The mayor of Paris had promised a positive occupation of the Eole garden for this summer. The garden was therefore evacuated. Anne hidalgo seems to have realized the problems in the park but then we do not know what will happen “, confirms Frédéric Francelle, spokesperson for Collectif 19.
The question of the care of drug addicts …
The mayor of Paris has indeed no answer on this public health issue. She knows it, the evacuation does not solve anything. “Does this solve the problem? No !“, she explained.
“I want us to open a place that comes to the aid of drug addicts because we cannot just evacuate the subject without treating it “, reiterated Anne Hidalgo who had written to Prime Minister Jean Castex in early June to ask “new support systems adapted to the problems of crack users“.
“I asked the government that we jointly open a place to take care of them but, for the moment, there is a divergence of views within the government, between those who want places of accompaniment and others who explain that it is enough to move the problem“, she told AFP.
Collective 19 also wants drug addicts not to be just dispersed. “Today what we want are rooms to stop consumption, not just rooms to supervise them like shooting rooms. We need closed structures. A place of reception, accommodation, care, but closed where drug addicts cannot go out freely, a bit like psychiatric hospitals“, adds Fréderic Francelle.
… must be medical and social according to the associations
Gaïa Paris is a medico-social association that works to reduce the risks associated with drug use in Paris. In the north-east of Paris, she carries out daily raids on drug addicts at the Jardins d’Eole. For José Matos, head of the service at the Reception and Support Center for Reducing the Risks of Drug Users (CAARUD), it is necessary to set up comprehensive medico-social monitoring.
Forcing people to quit doesn’t work.
José Matos, Gaïa Paris association
“Local residents and elected officials are asking that there be closed centers to treat these people, but treating people by force is not purely and simply legal and in any case it does not work.“, he denounces.
It offers medical, psychological and social care. For him, the solution lies in the creation of small daytime rest areas, with the possibility of consuming at lower risk. Gateway to a global healthcare system.
“We want small devices because one device puts enormous pressure on a neighborhood. The idea is to get people off the streets and consumption off the streets as well. We consider these rooms to be the gateway to treatment. People come to consume but they can find something else there: educators, nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, social workers. People can be supported at the global level, care, guidance, administrative support, screening for diseases such as HIV or hepatitis, legal aid. A whole network to support them if she wants to stop the consumption of narcotics“, he pleads.
José Matos has no doubts, “the evacuated drug users will not disappear, will not evaporate, disperse as the Prefecture can hope. They will continue to exist and consume“. At the end of 2019, these women and men were evacuated from the Porte de la Chapelle then from the Porte d’Aubervilliers, then from the Rosa Parks district, from the Place Stalingrad and today from the Jardins d’Eole. will continue to follow them, even dispersed.
