10:15 AM: DANIEL HAS ‘BREAKFAST’... A SYRINGE FULL OF LIQUID COCAINE
IT is 10.15am and Daniel Schiller sits down at a spartan stainlesssteel table top to prepare his ‘breakfast’. After some careful fiddling around with a syringe and a DIY tourniquet, the 29-year-old drug addict is ready to inject liquid cocaine into his tattooed arm. He finds a vein, the drug flows down through the needle and he can face the day ahead.
This is a daily routine for Daniel, who has spent half of his life behind bars – the last six of them for assaulting a police officer, a sentence which ended only five weeks ago.
But the convicted criminal is not forced to shoot up in a grimy hostel bedroom, or hiding out in an abandoned building – he gets his fix at one of Germany’s legal drug consumption rooms.
The centres, which offer free drug paraphernalia, a chair, a room and a time slot for drug users, are commonplace across parts of Europe. Now plans are being considered to open the UK’s first – in Glasgow city centre.
Last week, The Scottish Mail on Sunday spent a day at the Düsseldorfer Drogenhilfe e.V. – Düsseldorf Drug Help Association – to witness the grim reality of what happens inside one of 25 such centres across Germany, created in conjunction with the German AIDS organisation.
There, addicts of all ages and walks of life stream in from 8.30am each day to inject, sniff and smoke their narcotic of choice while medical professionals keep watch in case they overdose.
From the outside, the unremarkable glassfronted premises could easily be mistaken for a solicitor’s office or estate agency. The Venetian blinds give a degree of privacy but the front door remains open and unlocked.
THE facilities inside are clean and basic, with the whiff of burning drugs almost completely masked by the strong smell of antiseptic wash. Many of the users are on first-name terms with the staff, sharing a brief chat about the weather, children and the difficulty of getting a parking space before picking up their gear and shuffling off to one of ten drug-taking stations in the building.
People don’t hang around – they come for what they need to do and go away. Social worker Martin Seto, 41, oversees the day-to-day operation of the complex which – along with a shelter for the homeless and medical staff fees – costs the city of Düsseldorf around 800,000 euros per year to run, equivalent to around £670,000.
Mr Seto explains: ‘This is all about containment. The idea is to provide a safe environment so these people are not hanging around injecting or smoking or inhaling on the streets, in public squares, outside the main station.
‘The state is always abstinence-orien-
tated but here we just facilitate their habit in a controlled environment.
‘Most addicts do not come here to get “high” in the accepted sense. They come to restore a certain sense of normality as it is known to them. Besides, they only have a 30-minute timeframe to do what they do and then they have to leave.
‘Most male addicts we see have spent around half their lives in jail for, mostly, minor offences. The women have often been sexually abused. Most retain a fantasy in their minds of one day getting clean, of having a little house, a family, a car. Naturally, for most this remains just a fantasy.’
Daniel Schiller has no such fantasy. He told the MoS he came to the centre ‘because I live in an emergency shelter and I don’t want to do this in the street.
‘When I come here I know I will get a clean needle, an antiseptic swab, a syringe, a bit of peace and quiet and, if something goes wrong, there are people to help me.’
The Düsseldorf centre has a nurse and medical assistants on hand to provide emergency treatment when an overdose occurs.
‘The person will suddenly pass out and their face turn blue,’ says Mr Seto. ‘We have had a few of these cases, but no one has died here. And we deal with thousands of people every year.’
On an average day around 150 people will pass through the door of the drug consumption room on the city’s busy Erkratherstrasse, near bars, restaurants and a gym.
The addicts are observed at all times through a large glass mirror, which can be seen from the front office.
‘Clients’, as they are called, are forbidden from bringing alcohol on to the premises, to use mobile telephones or laptops, to deal drugs or to stay beyond their allotted time.
There is a plethora of other regulations, the infringement of which triggers warnings. Too many warnings and they are banned for a period of time.
Despite lives led in illegality, most of the addicts conform remarkably well to the rules. Mr Seto explains: ‘They come because they want to, because they feel safe here. They don’t want to jeopardise that.’
Unlike the proposed scheme for Glasgow, in which drugs could be prescribed to some users, the German model never offers drugs. Addicts must bring their own, although the law dictates that staff must inspect all substances before they are used.
The confusion in the law is apparent to all. In the past, Mr Seto has witnessed addicts who have been spotted buying drugs being chased by police from the main railway station to the centre where they claim a kind of ‘sanctuary’.
Mr Seto admits he had to call the police last year to inform them that a client was seen driving away after taking a hit of heroin.
‘It is imperfect,’ he concedes. ‘It is just the best solution we have at hand at the moment.
ALTHOUGH most people who come here are on the fringes of society, by no means all of them are. There are even doctors and healthcare workers who know the effects of heroin and who come here to inject – not on a regular basis, but once every few weeks. They know precisely what they can handle.’
Midway through the day, the MoS was introduced to 50-yearold Hannes Manner, who lives outside the city with his wealthy mother, who runs a taxi business.
Lucid and well-spoken, he picked up a sheet of silver foil and a plastic pipe to ‘chase the dragon’ – heating up a 0.2mg chunk of heroin (costing him the euro equivalent of £7.50) to inhale. He said: ‘People like me need a place like this to do this. You wouldn’t like to see me doing this outside the door to your home or in the stairwell of your flats, would you? I can’t do it at home, I can’t do it in the pub. I do it here.
‘I don’t hurt people, apart from myself. I have been doing it for decades and will never stop.’
Nobody could describe the drug consumption room as a jolly place – its morgue-like sterility, combined with the earnestness of the customers who use it to get their fix as swiftly as possible, gives it all the charm of a vivisection laboratory.
‘But I think that this place and places like it have saved lives,’ says Mr Seto, who holds a Masters degree in philosophy.
‘We cannot say that if we were not here, all would die. But here they learn at least basic hygiene standards to avoid sepsis and other drug user-related dangers.
‘And they are not doing it in the face of ordinary people. To that extent, I believe we succeed.’