08/18/2026
“Zurich’s radical response to Europe’s drug crisis tested by surge in use of crack co***ne”
“Three decades after the chaos of the Swiss city’s ‘Needle Park’, supervised drug use and state-backed he**in treatment have cut harm, but crack has posed new challenges”
The Irish Times Jul 20 2026 - 8 min read by Derick Scally
“Pablo is a smiling, 60-year-old ball of energy, charming everyone as he sweeps in with a bag of groceries and crack pipe. It’s just after 9am in what could be a youth club or a doctor’s practice: grey-tiled floors, walls painted in bright pinks and greens, functional chairs and stainless steel tables.
Pablo nods to the counter staff and vanishes into one of three small rooms adjacent, where 20 people are consuming crack co***ne and chatting with each other.
From girls in their 20s to an older man wearing plaster-covered work trousers and boots, there is no typical visitor to this city-run drug consumption room.
People come and go and staff, though watchful, are friendly, greeting many visitors by name as they allocate a 30-minute slot in a consumption room. After that, users have to vacate the room for others but can go one floor up to a lounge area with sofas, a television, books, a PC and a cafe area
Outside the communal consumption rooms are trays with complimentary equipment including tubes, lighters, distilled water, baking soda, sniffing paper and even plastic bottles – for improvised pipes – as well as glass bongs, sold at cost price.
Eight staff are on duty at any one time here. Four such consumption centres operate across the city, open from 7.30am for up to 13 hours. Each day, 21 staff in total work across all facilities. On the day The Irish Times visits, police trainees are being shown around the facility, part of Zurich’s four-pillar approach to reduce drug use and its negative consequences for all.
Half an hour after he went in, Pablo emerges, eyes shining and jewellery rattling. Between mouthfuls of rice pudding, he describes balancing his career as an insurance industry executive with lifelong drug use. Pablo first tried cannabis at 17, co***ne a year later and he**in at 20. He was drug-free for 10 years, thanks to a state-supported therapy, but now takes a cocktail of Diaphin – state-supplied he**in (more of which later) – and crack co***ne he bought on the street and brings here.
“I need both for the balance,” he says, linking his drug use to a lifetime of bipolar mood swings from manic to depressed.
Many people come here to get off the streets and have something to eat, he says. “I have a flat but come here because it gives my day structureand because, sometimes, I can help others.”
Pablo got started on drugs in the 1980s in Zurich’s Platzspitz, a pocket-sized park beside the central train station.
“Five of my friends died back then: four overdosed and one hanged himself,” he remembers, his smile fading briefly. “Back then, the Platzspitz was hell on earth.”
Today the park is a slice of heaven. On a sweaty summer afternoon, couples canoodle in the shade of trees and young men in shorts jump off a bridge into the cool, clean water of the Limmat river below.
Zurich native André Seidenberg nods in agreement with Pablo’s “hell on earth” recollection of this place. The city doctor watched as the tolerated drug scene here in the 1980s drew in ever more people from all over Europe. By the early 1990s, hundreds of daily visitors became thousands and Platzspitz became known globally as “needle park”. The 15,000 syringes collected here daily compounded spiralling HIV and hepatitis crises.
Seidenberg, then a young doctor “and a bit of a hippie”, remembers his frustration at a vicious circle of political helplessness and police crackdowns. Now 75, he points towards a historic, cast-iron bandstand that, back in the early 1990s, was “ground zero” of the drug scene here.
“You always had half a dozen people here, under piles of blankets in terrible conditions, who knew where the drugs were,” says Seidenberg. “This was the lowest level, most of those who ended up here died after a few days.”
For Seidenberg, a crucial turning point was a petition he organised, signed by 360 fellow city doctors, citing evidence-based arguments to demand a radical rethink.
Zurich’s resulting four-pillar drug policy, still in use today, pushes prevention, therapy, harm reduction and law enforcement. Why was that letter a key to change?
“Because we doctors,” he says, “were not state stooges”.
Beat Rhyner, deputy head of Zurich’s criminal police, says many factors were at play back then. But the sheer scale of the city’s drug problem in the 1990s – Zurich eventually ran out of prison space – forced an admission of defeat from even the strongest advocates of repressive measures in the police force.
“A broad public consensus emerged, running through all political parties across the spectrum, that things cannot get any worse so let’s try something new,” says Rhyner.
Ask older Zurich residents about the 1990s drug crises and many shudder visibly. At a city restaurant, guests discuss the appalling human cost, the emotional debates and the growing reputational damage to their city.
Most here think the four-pillar approach is a tolerable solution, if hardly a cause for celebration.
“If you strip out ignorance, fear and disapproval of drugs, and address the issue with facts,” says Burim, a local restaurant owner, “then what we have here is probably the best you can hope for”.
That chimes with the main message of Florian Meyer, city commissioner for harm reduction, in his office two floors above Pablo’s consumption room.
“Trying to play abstinence off against acceptance achieves little,” he said. “A mix of both are needed: to stabilise people in a way that allows them make informed choices.”
Nearly a decade in the job, Meyer’s hands-on work includes overseeing consumption rooms and co-ordinating with politicians and police. As consumption rooms move premises, he has become an expert at convincing wary new neighbours that the new facility in their street will not create new problems. If anything, he argues the opposite is the case: problems leave the street.
“We create attractive rooms where people – many, not all – are happy to come,” he says. “It is much easier to support people here, medically and with welfare, than when they are in the outdoor scene.”
After decades of success, however, all is not well in Zurich. Meyer presents a slide showing drug use last year, categorised by substance. Crack co***ne consumption in Zurich is – literally – off the chart. In the last decade, the highly addictive substance has flooded much of Europe. Waste water analysis in Switzerland shows the drug is everywhere, from big cities with progressive drug policies such as Zurich to rural areas with none.
After years of success, the race is on in Switzerland to adapt and expand urban-based four-pillar policies, with one big challenge. “As yet,” says Meyer, “we have no [synthetic] substitute for crack. We need more innovation in medical research to reduce harm here.”
That Meyer is now a global go-to expert on harm reduction is clear from an office noticeboard thick with business cards, including Gillian Shorter, reader in drug and alcohol research at Queen’s University Belfast’s school of psychology.
Shorter, who visited Zurich in June, has evaluated consumption room services globally and is finalising a review into Dublin’s Merchant’s Quay consumption room, on which she declines to comment.
Replicating Switzerland’s harm-reduction approach on the island of Ireland, she says, is doable but requires sustained public funding and close co-ordination between communities, health and criminal justice authorities.
A final piece of the puzzle is societal acceptance that people, who have often complex reasons for using drugs, remain rights-bearing citizens.
“I don’t think we can arrest our way out of this crisis,” says Shorter. “Locking people up or forcing them into treatment doesn’t work either, wasting a lot of taxpayer money that could be better spent on harm reduction, prevention and treatment.”
Just how much money Zurich spends on harm reduction is clear from the Crossline day clinic. Open 365 days a year and up to nine hours a day, this is not a drop-in consumption room but a legal drug dispensary where all visitors have been vetted by their doctor, health authorities and staff here as addicts, suitable for treatment.
Beyond a long consumption room with metal benches is a room holding three massive safes. Two women check and recheck stock that includes morphine, methadone, he**in and its brand name twin, Diaphin.
All in tidy white boxes, these drugs have been manufactured by Swiss pharmaceutical companies and dispensed – legally – under state contract since 1994.
Crossline staff say their clientele ranges from Zurich homeless to city bankers, who collect their seven-day he**in ration once a week. All drug costs are covered by Swiss public health, Crossline chief doctor Mehdi Safavi says, which is still cheaper than the alternative.
“People here are kept stable and we can catch many things early on,” he says. Patients remain functioning members of society, he adds, rather than falling through the cracks and ending up in an intensive care bed “that costs 5,000 Swiss francs [€5,400] a night”.
Abstinence is not a precondition for treatment here, though support is offered to anyone who chooses this route.
Three decades in, the Zurich model has helped foster a broad public understanding in Switzerland of addiction as an illness and not a lifestyle choice. Crossline nursing staff report seeing first-hand the positive effect of having such a stable and progressive system.
“One patient told me he used to only have money for co***ne,” said nurse Marcel, “but now he has found a hobby, flying drones, and goes on holiday twice a year. He told me: ‘I have a life again’.”
As Zurich adapts its lessons from the 1990s to new challenges, experts here say the key to tackling a drug problem – whether personal or at societal level – is acknowledging reality.
“Sometimes societies have to ... have a shock for change to happen,” says Safavi of Crossline. “The question is: do things really have to go that far?”
Speaking from Belfast, Shorter agrees. She is hopeful about growing recognition of how he**in-assisted treatment, as in Switzerland, lifts people out of the illegal drug economy with side effects that include often highly dangerous – or addictive – impurities.
“We have this problem. It doesn’t matter how we got here but what we want to do now,” she says.
“Zurich politicians and public decided: this cannot continue. They took risks, experimented and evolved a robust system over time.”
Back in the Platzspitz park, veteran drug policy campaigner André Seidenberg pauses on a bridge over the Limmat river. As he watches the water below, memories of the dark days past flash across his face.
“I knew many of those who died and they haunt me even now,” he says, tears in his eyes. “It still makes me furious. Above all at how today, once more, we seem to just shrug and accept drug deaths as unavoidable.”
Zurich’s Radical Response to Europe’s Drug Crisis The Irish Times July 2026
