They are the ones you don’t want to see, who make you uncomfortable. Those that have been chased away and displaced for thirty years, in the northeastern triangle of Paris, through publicized police operations. Since September 24, crack users have been evacuated to Place Auguste-Baron, in the square de la Porte de la Villette (19e arrondissement). Impossible to know until when. It is therefore here, between rue du Chemin-de-Fer and the ring road, that the world met them several days in a row.
A figure, emerged in the early morning, all wrapped up in her clothes, had warned us, before disappearing as quickly as she had tumbled: “Do you know what crack does to the brain?” Do you know ? Crack is an unforgivable mistake. One step, one step that you miss, and after that, it’s like you’re breaking your face every second, you understand? ”
Since the dismantling of the “crack hill” at Porte de la Chapelle at the end of 2019, their existence has become visible in a society that does not know what to do with this embarrassing presence. They are hiding from their own families. They know that they are taken for less than nothing: they are drugged, addicted, on edge, but are neither deaf nor blind. Some of them can’t even stand what they have become and understand the locals who don’t want them. They are a problem. And are even the subject of slogans on posters brandished in demonstrations of exasperated residents, who call for “Rat control” of the places they occupy and “Infest like animals”.
After Place Stalingrad, the “crack hill” at the Porte de la Chapelle, the Eole gardens and rue Riquet, the new consumer fixing point is established in a space planted with trees. A square crossed by rue Forceval, which passed under the ring road in a tunnel, before this passage from Paris to Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis) was walled up. Symbol of the absence of a way out, if not that offered by this pebble at 5 euros, of about 0.2 grams, a derivative of cocaine cut with ammonia, which is heated on a filter at the end of a pipe. One in the morning, one in the evening, sometimes all day and sometimes nothing. It depends on the people, the money.
“You make a cross on life”
Black hood over red hood, pipe in the left hand, lighter in the right, Lamine is 48 years old. His left eye damaged, his face emaciated, and his bag clamped to his back. Sitting on a low wall at the back of the square, he agrees, with the authorization of one of the dealers, to look for the words, on condition that his word is listened to.
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