Square Forceval, at the Porte de La Villette, everything is calm now. Since the evacuation on October 5, a large police force has been put in place. “1,000 police officers will be deployed so that this camp does not reconstitute elsewhere” had promised the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. But where are the people who frequented this place, the 400 to 600 drug users, especially crack users, who slept here or came to get their supplies?
Hard to say precisely. “Nobody is able to give the exact distribution, because the process was quite chaotic, explains Abdou Lahad Ndiaye, deputy director of Oppelia Charonne, an organization which welcomes drug users. This generated several movements, back to the structures [de soin et d’accueil] in order to relax. But people come out to eat outside. There have been movements towards make-do solutions, some have returned home. Others left Ile-de-France or Paris…” Still other people were locked up in administrative detention centers, around fifty, according to Cimade.
In the streets and in the reception centers
In the streets, many find themselves scattered between the 18th and 19th, in small groups. “They are on Boulevard Ney, Boulevard Macdonald,” says Anne Guérin, who manages specialized accommodation for drug users in the 18th arrondissement for the SOS group. An association manager claims to have seen them near Saint-Lazare station and at Bonne Nouvelle. Another speaks of Stalingrad and Jaurès. Charles Merlin, from the Better Act Against Crack collective, also claims to observe a crowd of up to a hundred people sometimes at Porte de la Chapelle, opposite the rest area where consumers were directed on the day of the evacuation. .
Because if the users find themselves for a good part in the street, the evacuation facilitated the return or the arrival of a certain number of them towards the reception and care structures. The Porte de la Chapelle rest area is now “full”, says Léon Gomberoff, director of several care centers in Paris for the Aurore association. According to him, the frequentation of this space has gone from 80 to 100 people a day before the evacuation to around 180 to 200 today. Other structures are seeing an increase in their activity, such as the Charonne association’s North-East sites, the Sleep-In of the SOS group in the 18th arrondissement, where almost exclusively former Forceval regulars come to sleep, or even the consumption room at lower risk of Lariboisière, which saw the passages on its place increase by 20% after the evacuation, a figure which “continues to increase” according to its head of service Jamel Lazic. “We did not have an increase in different people, but people who passed less will stay longer, and people who we had not seen for a while came back”, wishes to specify Jamel Lazic.
Beneficial evacuation?
From there to saying that the evacuation was beneficial for the care of drug users, there is a step that not all the professionals we interviewed are ready to take. “I don’t see anything positive in the evacuation as it was done… This scene has existed for a year, we could organize the entry into the care, it would have had more adhesions”, regrets for example Abdou Lahad Ndiaye.
Léon Gomberoff sounds a slightly different story: “We are not against the evacuation of Forceval. Finding crack is less easy now and it allows you to take breaks. A site like Forceval is a public health disaster. But the trained psychoanalyst recognizes that the evacuation “invisibilizes” the problem.
Not enough venues
For the professionals interviewed, evacuations are not fully effective if drug addicts have no place to fall. However, today, all the places of reception are saturated. The Sleep-in in the 18th for example, a specialized accommodation center for the drug public and which requires prior registration which must be renewed each day, opens its reservations at 2.30 p.m. “At 2:32 p.m. we are complete,” says Anne Guérin. Léon Gomberoff is already worried about the closure in March of the Porte de la Chapelle rest area: “The town hall is going to take over the site, because they are supposed to use it for the Olympic Games”, indicates the director, for which should not only keep this space, but also open one in the 19th.
“It is not possible to continue to create places without rights, where there are no rules. There were tents in Forceval with women who were abused every day,” thunders Léon Gomberoff. “We are told that the solution is abstinence. But you have to understand where people are and that there are few places with weaning beds. The very long waiting times, with sometimes complicated criteria: you need health cover, papers…”, adds Jamel Lazic.
For the associations, this insufficiency also has a direct impact on local residents in addition to drug addicts, because people left to fend for themselves consume more than people in care. As summarized by Anne Guérin: “As long as we don’t take care of people, they won’t reduce their consumption. »