Twelve Years After Letten. The Users of Hard Drugs in the Services for Contact and Support in Zurich [D]
Thomas Gautschi and Dominik HangartnerDuring the early 1980s one of Europe's largest open drug scenes developed in Zurich. The concomitant phenomenon of this drug scene was the medium term pauperization of the drug addicts. To counter the poor health of this hard-to-reach population, the city of Zurich decided to set up low threshold services. This article reports results from a recent study on the state of health and the conditions of living of drug addicts who regularly make use of the low threshold services. The study shows that the four low threshold services located in Zurich clearly fulfill their function. Comparing our data to data collected in 1997 (Braun et al. 2001) shows that drug addicts today seem healthier, react more sensible on price differentiations on the drug market and are socially better integrated into public life. As a result of this fact, users of hard drugs form (with respect to sociodemographic variables and the consumption pattern) a more homogeneous group than ten years ago.
Swiss Journal of Sociology, 35 (3), 2009, 479-499
