Farewell to the Porte de la Villette! In a press release released Tuesday evening, the police headquarters said it had located a place belonging to the SNCF in the 12th arrondissement of Paris in order to install crack users there, grouped together since the end of September in the 19th arrondissement. According to the prefecture, the public group has “given its agreement” to the State for “the loan and the provision” of one of its plots located “at the intersection of two railway lines and Boulevard Poniatowski”.
It is in this industrial wasteland that the Bercy-Charenton urban project should emerge within a few years, a new district made up of housing, offices, shops and green spaces. For the prefect, this site satisfies “as best as possible” the search criteria: “as far as possible from residential areas, shops or transport nodes” but all the same “accessible to health and social services”.
An “absolute absurdity”
But for Emmanuel Grégoire, first deputy (PS) of mayor Anne Hidalgo, the choice of this concerted development area is an “absolute absurdity” and a “solitary decision taken without any consultation”. He told AFP the city’s intention to “obstruct this strategy in the coming hours” and requested an urgent meeting with the other partners in the crack plan, the Ile-de-France prefecture and the regional health agency.
Emmanuel Grégoire, himself elected from the 12th arrondissement, denounces a “simple displacement of the problem” and the choice of a site “absurd in the opinion of professionals and associations”. The health assistant, Anne Souyris (EELV), said she was “stunned” by this decision. “We put them in another wasteland and all that by force, without shelter, without perspective,” she laments. In a letter sent Monday to the prefect, Anne Hidalgo had reaffirmed her “Clear and firm opposition” to a new organized movement of consumers of this cheap and very addictive derivative of cocaine.
Third trip in less than a year
“Relocating drug users does not make it possible to definitively solve the problem of crack, but it is a duty vis-à-vis the residents of the 19th and 18th arrondissements who have been tested for too long by the presence of drug users”, explains the prefect Didier Lallement. “Drug users need comprehensive, social and health care to which the succession of police operations does not respond in any way”, retorts Anne Hidalgo.
At the end of September, despite the disagreement of the town hall, the prefect had already decided to relocate drug addicts from the gardens of Eole, where they had been grouped together since the spring to relieve the neighboring district of Stalingrad, towards the gate of La Villette. If this trip succeeds, it will be their third trip in the space of nine months.