If you step out of the Frankfurt bahnhof (the train-station), and face east....you can draw this square that goes for about a mile in front of you, and a mile to the left. This 'quarter' of the city has become over the past thirty years....'junkie' mile.
It's an interesting story because I can remember walking out of the main station, and facing this district that was mostly just a bar and red-light zone in the late 1970s. You might have found forty-odd transients around the station itself....mostly homeless, but beyond that.....no significant drug sales.
What happened? Most people will say that as the wall came down, and more human traffic started to cross through Frankfurt, it shifted into a high-volume drug sales area. Cocaine, crack, and various drugs started to arrive in the 1990s.
Over the past twenty years? Heroin is now a pretty common drug in the 'druggie' mile. Just walking through at around 9 AM, you can count at least three hundred folks either laying there on the street, or in some daze stumbling around. If you walked the entire five block by five block area? It's probably upwards to a thousand people who are in some pause, waiting for cash flow and a chance for their next fix.
The curious thing....if you go to Hamburg, Koln, Berlin, Munich, or any of the major cities in Germany....it's mostly the same story.
Berlin now has Gorlitzer Park, which is treated as an open drug-sales area, and the cops mostly just skip patrolling it. Locals sit and shake their head, because it ought to be a public park where kids could roam and regular people use as just a normal park.
Politicians? They saddle-up the cops with a once-or-twice a month patrol.....arresting a dozen here or two-dozen there, but most are out on the street within twenty-four hours. Cops mostly laugh over the situation because prosecutors and judges really aren't into resolving or correcting things.
Where this goes? The general public is looking skeptically at politicians these days and asking about city behavior, and what it'll take to resolve this. Other than just grabbing people off the street, and 'quartering' them in some forced-rehab center way out in the middle of nowhere....that's about the only correction left to take.
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