“I’m not an addict,” he insists, adding that he spent between 13-14,000 euros on crack in the space of two months.Īnd he makes a clear distinction between his crack habit and that of the homeless addicts in the garden. But it's true that it was harder during the lockdown because I only worked two days a week.' © Mehdi Chebil The construction worker says that working allows him to control his consumption: 'I don't think I'm addicted because I never smoke when I work. Joaquim smokes a crack pipe on the walkway of the Éole Gardens. You can't snort coke all day long, or your nose will explode.” “It’s that after one hit, you want another hit, and then another, and another, and another. “The problem with crack,” he said, as he slid the galette into his crack pipe, lit it and inhaled. Joaquim was introduced to crack in 2016 after undergoing treatment to wean himself off cocaine. ![]() Spending 13-14,000 euros on crack in two months “I’d be less tempted to come here,” said Joaquim, 53, who lives in the western Paris suburb of Boulogne with his partner and 20-year-old daughter, but comes to the gardens two or three time a week to score. No one believes this will solve Paris’s crack problem but some of the city’s more casual users say it might help them kick their drug habit. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has announced she plans to close the garden to users at the end of June. The part on the right of the picture - the north side - is the one occupied by the drug addicts later in the day. The Éole gardens seen from Ryko's balcony. Matos was concerned that grouping users in the same place made life much more violent for smokers, particularly for women, two of whom have been raped in broad daylight. “We’re seeing new people all the time, many of whom are increasingly vulnerable,” Matos said, explaining that the majority of Parisian crack users don’t live on the streets – many of them just come to the garden to score and head home. “People are coming here from Paris, the suburbs, the countryside,” said Jose Matos of the NGO Gaia as his colleagues handed out face masks, bottles of water, injection material and clean crack pipes to users at the edge of the garden. “It’s five euros a hit, ten euros for a galette,” he said, referring to the smokable rocks of crack cocaine he buys at the garden every day. “There are more dealers here than trees,” said Algerian-born Faisal, 38, with a cackle that revealed his remaining two teeth. The Éole gardens, a sliver of parkland in northeast Paris, are just a short walk from Montmartre, a celebrated artists’ quarter that Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso and Degas once called home.īut since mid-May, when Paris authorities chose to group the city’s crack addicts in the upper part of the garden and extended closing time til 1am, the park has become the French capital’s open-air crack kingdom. Sheep from the garden’s educational farm graze on the lawns as a circle of women do Qi Gong and a runner in neon-green lycra sprints through the park. © Mehdi ChebilĪ few hundred metres away, in the south of the gardens, small children play on the swings of a newly renovated playground. A crack user (second from the right) hands a 20-euro bill to a dealer to buy his dose.
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