ZURICH — What makes this room remarkable is not what’s present but what’s absent: no garbage, no violence, no visible misery. A few men sit at small tables, their trembling fingers scraping together white powder, pushing it onto spoons or aluminum foil, then heating it with a lighter. A ventilation system hums, whisking away the smoke from their pipes.
This room on Selnaustrasse, in the heart of Zurich, has drawn politicians and experts from around the world — eager to learn from Swiss city. The men here are consuming something that is wreaking havoc across cities around the world: crack cocaine, a substance both euphoric and intensely addictive.
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Florian Meyer looks at the crack smokers and says: “I think we have found a good answer.” Meyer, a slim 44-year-old man with a quiet voice, does not want to boast. Rather, he seems to be asking himself: Why isn’t anyone copying our way of dealing with this?
Meyer is the head of the Zurich contact and information points. He often travels abroad — recently to San Francisco and Mexico City — and gives lectures on Zurich’s solution to the crack epidemic. There is great need for these kinds of discussions in cities in Germany and elsewhere, where drug conflicts have been escalating.
In Berlin, residents reported that crack users had smashed car windows to get money for their drugs. In Frankfurt’s train station district, they consume in hallways. In Bremen’s city center, they smoke in playgrounds. And in Münster, they besiege public spaces. If they are chased by the police, they simply move on to the next public space — or come back the next day. From 2022 to 2023 alone, crimes related to crack and cocaine rose by 29% in Germany.
How could Zurich, of all places, find an answer to the problem? A city that was known worldwide as a hotspot for its open air drug scene until the 1990s? At that time, Platzspitz, a park behind the main train station, was called Needle Park because of the many heroin syringes on the ground. In 1991 alone, more than 3,600 addicts had to be resuscitated there. It became the symbol of a failed drug policy.
A practical approach
“The key factor,” says Meyer, “is retail trade.” Meyer leads people away from the consumption room, past the clothing collection point, outside. A woman in torn clothes is standing under a wooden roof, smoking a cigarette. In this corner, addicts are allowed to sell each other the drugs that they obtain illegally, while social workers watch. They call it “ant trade” because only very small quantities are tolerated. The police know about it.
“During the height of Zurich’s open drug scene, conditions became so intolerable that every key player in the city was ready to try something new,” says Beat Rhyner from Zurich’s criminal police. Officially, drug trafficking remains illegal, but enforcement takes a pragmatic backseat.
“That’s very Swiss,” Rhyner adds. “It’s a practical approach: If it works, let it be.”
The collective trauma of Platzspitz was one of the reasons why a progressive drug policy was established in Zurich in the mid-1990s and was supported across party lines. Since then, the city has no longer fought the open drug scene with repression, but has instead created spaces in which drugs can be consumed and sold.
“The question is: Do we want to tolerate small-scale trade in designated facilities — or have an uncontrolled open drug scene outside?” Meyer says.
Over the past 10 years, the consumption of cocaine, and later crack, has increased. This is also due to the fact that large shipments of cocaine found their way to Europe in Colombia after the 2016 peace agreement between Bogotá and the FARC, causing prices to plummet and the drug to reach mainstream society.
There’s no substitute
Today, crack smokers account for 80% of the roughly 1,000 clients at Zurich’s three contact centers, and their numbers grow each year. In western Switzerland, crack consumption has tripled since 2020.
The high only lasts a few minutes, then the users fall into a hole and have to take more. The pressure of addiction is high. That is why, says Meyer, retail trade in the facilities is so important. Addicts go where the substance is. Unlike heroin, there’s no substitution therapy for crack. Switzerland is now debating whether to introduce state-regulated cocaine distribution, similar to its heroin programs.
Once clients are in Meyer’s care, they receive food, drink and a chance to rest, alongside access to social services. Many crack users are under constant stress. They are awake for two or three days at a time, don’t eat or drink anything, and they lose weight massively. Many become aggressive and unpredictable, Meyer says.
When the scene was driven away, the addicts simply moved on to the nearby former Letten train station.
Social workers in Berlin-Kreuzberg report similar issues. Yet there, crack users rarely frequent consumption rooms and instead gather in Görlitzer Park, where only a few smoking spots exist and police strictly enforce anti-trafficking laws. In an attempt to curb the chaos, Berlin’s government plans to fence off the park at night, hoping to scatter the drug scene.
The authorities in Zurich once tried using the same approach. When the drug scene developed in Needle Park, users came from across Europe. The police closed the park, drove the scene away — and the situation escalated.
“There was a time when we had to step over dead bodies,” says Martin, one of the users of the consumption room. He himself was at Platzspitz at the time, consuming heroin. When the scene was driven away, the addicts simply moved on to the nearby former Letten train station. The drug problem remained, and the users became destitute before everyone’s eyes.
Legitimate interests
Martin is still an addict today. He consumes diamorphine, pure heroin, and once a week freebase, a cocaine mixture similar to crack — all under the supervision of social workers.
In Zurich they follow the so-called acceptance strategy. Put simply: the authorities accept that many addicts will never get clean again. Instead of starting therapy immediately, they first try to stabilize those affected socially. Martin, for example, now has an apartment and an income. The drug, he explains, is not the beginning but the end of a negative spiral; Martin worked in construction, lost his job, couldn’t find a new one, lost his apartment and started taking drugs.
Dealing with the open drug scene is also difficult for many communities and cities in Germany because security and social policy collide; they are rarely thought of as things that can work together. In this conflict, there are two groups affected with different interests: the addicts and the residents.
“Both have legitimate interests, and we are trying to pacify them,” Meyer says.
In addition to the consumption rooms, the Zurich model also includes Sip Zurich, an outreach social work service. Just a few meters from the consumption room on Selnaustrasse, Rebecca Fröhlicher and Corinne Gloor are preparing for their deployment on a November morning.
As long as no one complains and no hard drugs are consumed, they do not have to intervene.
They don’t wait for the clients, they go to them. In their bum bags, they pack a respirator mask, a rescue blanket and a pair of tongs to pick up syringes. One of their tasks is to prevent the emergence of open drug scenes. Sip Zurich has set up a hotline for this purpose: Residents can report incidents, and the social workers come to solve the problem.
Fröhlicher and Gloor get into a VW bus and drive to Bäckeranlage, a park in the center. A few men and women are sitting on benches drinking alcohol and listening to loud music. Some of them seem very drunk. On the other side, a kindergarten group is playing. Fröhlicher and Gloor greet them in a friendly manner and ask the teachers and drinkers if everything is OK. Then they drive on. As long as no one complains and no hard drugs are consumed, they do not have to intervene.
Last year, right here, the Zurich model almost failed. When a nearby drug consumption room had to close for renovation in the spring, an open-air drug scene emerged in the Bäckeranlage within a few days.
“We, the police, were among the first to demand a new drug consumption room,” Officer Ryhner says. The open drug scene was gently pushed out of the park in order to be reestablished elsewhere, in a supervised drug consumption room.
Keep the scene moving
A few streets further on, at Schanzengraben, Fröhlicher and Gloor come across a woman and a man squatting on the ground, scraping together white powder, presumably cocaine. Fröhlicher asks the woman to leave the place. The woman starts arguing, yells that “they should leave her alone” and looks up angrily at Fröhlicher.
Fröhlicher remains friendly but firm, and asks the woman to go into the consumption room. After a few minutes, the woman collects her drug paraphernalia and shuffles away. Fröhlicher says that problems arise when the scene establishes itself in one place and the public space becomes a consumption space. As the drugs are sold, more and more consumers come.
It is important that police officers on patrol understand the perspective of social work.
“When the consumers then settle down, it becomes something like a living room for them, and they define the rules of the place,” Fröhlicher says. To prevent this, Sip Zurich works closely with the police. If social workers realize they can’t make any progress, they call the police. Conversely, social workers are called by police officers to de-escalate conflicts.
Rhyner says it is important that police officers on patrol understand the perspective of social work. Part of every police training course is therefore an internship at Sip. The repressive measures of the police are thus closely interlinked with the supportive measures of social work.
In Germany, this cooperation is lacking; there is no cooperation plan when dealing with crack. Isolated consumption rooms, such as those in Hamburg, Berlin or Frankfurt, are usually run by non-profit organizations; in many places, there are none at all. If you ask the Berlin state government how to deal with the crack problem, you are referred to the state addiction commissioner. She, in turn, refers you to the city administration, and there are no city-sponsored addiction rooms sponsored.
Worth the cost
It is afternoon in the consumption room on Selnaustrasse. A man is crouched on a sofa wrapped in a blanket, two others are drinking coffee. The room is still busy, with new smokers allowed in every half hour. The facility closes at 3 p.m. Then the clients have to move on to the next contact point, which is then opened. This is another strategy intended to keep the scene moving, says Meyer.
At the end of November, he traveled to Frankfurt to present the Zurich model to social workers, addiction researchers, public prosecutors and police officers. When Meyer finished his presentation, he says, he was met with a lot of skepticism, especially from security authorities. Drug trafficking cannot simply be allowed, and the social facilities are far too expensive. No city or municipality in Germany has enough money for that.
Meyer says the city of Zurich pays 7.2 million Swiss francs – that’s 7.6 million euros or .9 million – annually for the service. Most of that is personnel costs. Yet Meyer argues that early investment saves far more in long-term damage control.
He believes that tackling the crack problem in an effective way is simply an issue of political will. In Zurich, he says, it took Needle Park and the many drug-related deaths to force them to try something new and choose a pragmatic approach. In Germany, they are not yet ready to take that step.
