The last turnaround came from the North. In Lille, a sudden stop was given to the project for a lower risk consumption room (SCMR), commonly known as a “shooting room”. Everything was ready at the end of October to accommodate twelve drug users and injectors (mainly heroin and cocaine; crack…) per hour, 7 days a week in the afternoon, in the Faubourg-de-Béthune district. But the state changed its mind at the last minute: no question of opening this room to the place planned, the Prime Minister, Jean Castex, indicated to the town hall by mail, Monday, October 25.
In the field, around these so-called “risk reduction” devices which should allow, with the objective of public health and public peace, very marginalized drug users to consume in a secure environment, tensions have rarely appeared so strong. . A real paradox: the experiment of “shooting rooms”, launched in 2016 with a structure in Paris, another in Strasbourg, received the blank check from the government this summer. It is therefore a boost that was hoped for by the actors supporting these structures.
Matignon has indeed rendered an arbitration in their favor: the measure is included in the Social Security financing bill (PLFSS), the examination of which in the Senate was due to begin on Monday, November 8. On paper, the Ministry of Health, which defends these devices whose “Positive balance sheet” was recently established by a report from Inserm, therefore won against the interior, which has never hidden its opposition to these places where drugs are consumed.
In the PLFSS, in addition to the extension of the two existing rooms, the development of new structures, renamed “Addiction treatment stops”, with a provisional budget of 2 million euros per year until 2025. “What was blocking so far was the frame, assures the deputy La République en Marche (LRM) of Charente Thomas Mesnier, general rapporteur of the text. With this measure, we are lifting the blockages, other rooms will open, that makes sense, the will is there, the credits too. “
In Lille, “we are in the absurd”
The state, however, seems far from speaking with one voice. In Lille, it was not the local elected officials who did an about-face, as has happened on several occasions in the past on these sensitive projects which provoke fears and opposition among residents. But the prime minister: “The establishment of a room on the Boulevard de Metz would be detrimental to the proper deployment of the“ witness district ”operation carried out by the Ministry of the Interior since the summer of 2021 to fight against particularly intense drug trafficking in this area” , wrote Jean Castex to the socialist mayor, Martine Aubry.
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