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Germany: Fix: Some Like It Not
Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Saturday 25 Nov 2000 Website: http://www.vancouversun.com/ Author: Frances Bula, Vancouver Sun SOME LIKE IT NOT Ute Sellin Is One Of Those Who Has Benefited From The German Approach -- And Perhaps Been Penalized By It Too. For Ute Sellin, Frankfurt's drug policy has been both salvation and a sentence to hopelessness. Eight years ago, the then 27-year-old was picked up near dead in Frankfurt's infamous needle park. She had sepsis, an infection that had spread from an abscess throughout her body, and endocartis, an infection of the heart that addicts frequently get. She spent weeks in the hospital recovering. Since she had been so sick, however, she qualified to get on Frankfurt's methadone program - -- something that is only available to addicts who have life-threatening illnesses related to their addiction. Until 1991, methadone programs -- the most common substitute used worldwide to try to get heroin addicts off heroin -- had been almost non-existent in Frankfurt. Doctors said they would just encourage addicts to keep using drugs and resisted them. But after heavy pressure from Frankfurt's Monday morning group, doctors agreed to start lowering the barrier. Addicts would be able to get it the same day they applied, but only if they met the at-death's-door requirement. That was the group's way of ensuring doctors took on the tough addicts, not just middle-class ones who wouldn't disrupt their waiting rooms. It's in many ways still less liberal than the methadone program B.C. has had for years, but it was a vast improvement for conservative Germany. Cafe Fix Now, at 35, Sellin is still on methadone and leading a life that was unimaginable to her eight years ago when she was homeless, prostituting and dealing to support her habit. This particular Monday in November, the 35-year-old Sellin looks like any prosperous Frankfurter, wearing bright red lipstick that is a dramatic contrast to her black leather beret, pants and coat. Sellin, an outgoing woman with a brash and funny Mae West way of talking that she picked up during her four years working as a stripper in Los Angeles and San Francisco, lives in an apartment on the west side of the city, paid for by the city's housing department. Her monthly welfare cheque is healthy enough that she packs a cell phone -- a handy, as they're called here -- and she earns some extra money legally by working in the cafeteria and cutting hair at Cafe Fix, the drug users drop-in centre that is around the corner from the main safe- injection room in Frankfurt. Unlike many of the clients, who have nodded out at one of the tables in the bright yellow sponge-painted room, Sellin is alert and always up for talking to any friends who drop by. She comes here four times a week to get her methadone and, if her urine shows up clean during the once-a- week tests, she gets to take more home for the other three days instead of having to make the trek into the city. She's had lots of leeway on the methadone program. She continued using drugs for the first three years she was on it and she's had two major relapses since. But they've let her stay on it, and things are pretty steady for her now. The Rest Is Missing But Sellin has one problem with all this. Frankfurt has been willing to keep her alive and off the street, yes. But in many other ways, it has consigned her and people like her to a trash can. A heart valve was damaged when she had endocarditis, seriously enough that she gasps for air if she goes up the stairs and her fingers are swollen to sausage size. But doctors have told her that she doesn't need an operation; she can just keep taking her heart medication. She's sure they say that because she's on methadone. Canadian health workers say that would never happen in Canada, that someone like Sellin would be moved to the top of the surgery list. Sellin said she was also turned down by the local employment office for a two-year training program in "media operations" -- computer and design. "They said, 'Oh, it's too risky for us, you're a drug addict.'" That's not an uncommon attitude in Frankfurt. Although many people endorse the Frankfurt Way, even the most liberal will say offhandedly that there's not much point re-educating junkies and coke addicts because they're so burned out, they'll never be able to do anything. That's in stark contrast to the North American individualist culture where, as much as addicts are blamed for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, there is always a prevailing belief that they can overcome their pasts. For Sellin, it's hard to accept that she's judged as not worth investing in. She grew up in a middle-class family in Frankfurt; her father worked in a bank, her mother at German Telecom. Before she ran away from home at 14, rebelling against her parents' strict Jehovah's Witness rules, she was a good student who took painting lessons at an art academy. And, in spite of a 20-year addiction that began shortly after she left home, she's managed to pick up near-perfect English and relatively fluent French. So she doesn't understand why the system is willing to save her life, but not to give her a chance at making it productive. "The first step is there," she says, "but the rest is missing."
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