What is his project? In a letter dated Monday, unveiled by AFP, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, told the prefect of the North of his “firm opposition” to the upcoming opening of a lower risk consumption room ( SCMR) in Lille. The minister, candidate for departmental in the North, takes a late position, knowing that the project had been in the city hall for some time and that it had been written in black and white in Martine Aubry’s municipal program.
According to AFP, Gerald Darmanin warns the prefect that the state will not give any support to the project of the elected socialist Lille. “Drugs must not be accompanied but fought”, writes the minister in his letter. Surprising when we know that, to open, an SCMR must receive the approval of the prefecture and the Ministry of Health. That the preparatory work be carried out in conjunction with these same bodies, the Regional Health Agency (ARS) and associations. And that the town hall would not have announced the date and place of opening without having obtained all the green lights.
Views that differ according to the ministries
In his argument, the Minister of the Interior explains that his services have observed on the ground “the extremely harmful consequences of the creation of the SCMRs in Paris and Strasbourg”. He adds that these places promote “the fixation of consumers in a single place, with all the associated disorders: degradation, injection in plain sight, brawls…”.
It appears that, according to the departments, the findings on the ground are not at all the same. Thus, at the beginning of June, the Ministry of Health confirmed that it wished to perpetuate the existing SCMRs and register them “in common law” in order to leave the possibility “for the municipalities to open new rooms”. The services of Olivier Véran had recognized the “positive” results of the SCMRs installed in Paris and Strasbourg, although the first is highly contested by residents.
Asked by 20 minutes, the professor of addictology at the Lille University Hospital, Olivier Cottencin declared: “There are objective figures in the cities where the experimentation takes place. This shows that the situation cannot be worse and that it is often better ”. Same story for the sociologist Marie Jauffret-Roustide: “when we look at the statistics of delinquency, we do not observe any degradation”, she explained about the SCMR of Paris.