Needle Park

Excerpt from article originally published in
Mother Jones, San Francisco Chronicle, Baltimore Sun, Cleveland Plain Dealer (February, 1990)
    Walk through the bank-laden streets of Zurich’s financial district, one block to the park behind the National Museum of Switzerland, and you are suddenly at a scene of human carnage – sealed with the approval of the Zurich City Council. ...
   Beny, 30 years old, fills a government-supplied syringe with a mixture of cocaine and heroin and sees the police drive up. “Hey, they’ve got a new car,” he laughs, and prods with the needle in search of an elusive vein. The police greet Beny and drive by.
   The practical Swiss, it appears, have lost their minds.
    “One has to be a little pragmatic,” says Dr. Werner Fuchs, a soft-spoken physician and member of the Zurich AIDS Commission. “AIDS will cause more deaths in our society than drugs if we do not provide addicts with a clean shoot. It is a simple equation.”...
    “I think this place is awful,” a man in the park says as he prepares a shot using a government-issued needle. “It will teach people to become junkies.”...
    A two-year study is under way to determine whether the needle exchanges and the open scene have been effective.... But the scene itself, for all the rational arguments, seems a festering wound in the center of a culture known for its orderliness. Walk briefly past the mass of human tragedy in the open scene, and every nerve cries out, "Close it down." ...The open scene assaults our consciousness and insults us with the gory details of the enormous numbers of lives wasted by drugs. And it makes it clear why most cities try to hide the problem or attempt to chase it away."...