“People think that you can behave differently here, that you don’t stick out,” said Wolfgang Barth, a veteran local social worker.
Germany’s first drug consumption room opened there in 1996, modelled on similar services in Switzerland.
Inside a plain room with stainless steel benches, heroin addicts can be seen “cooking” the drug on spoons over tea lights before injecting it into their arms or groins.
Today, three centres also provide addicts with food, beds and counselling.
“The primary goal is to save lives and not to criminalise people,” says Christian Rupp, city spokesman for health and social affairs.
Last year 20 people died of drug overdoses in Frankfurt, down from a peak of 147 in 1991. “Nobody has yet died of an overdose in a consumption room,” Rupp said.
But some worry that the concentration of help centres signals a permissive attitude, attracting yet more addicts to the area.
‘Drug tourism’
Hesse state’s conservative premier, Boris Rhein, in March charged that the Bahnhofsviertel had become a “magnet for drug tourism… a closed ecosystem of buying, getting high, getting treatment and getting care and advice all in one place”.
Local members of the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) party this month called for the closure of the area’s consumption rooms altogether.