Reconfigurations of Security: Governing Heroin Users in Frankfurt am Main, 1975–1995

Abstract

Today, the city of Frankfurt am Main is widely known as one of the first major cities in Germany having adopted so-called “harm reduction” policies towards heroin users. Rather than repressing or forcing users towards abstinence, the city administration primarily focuses on reducing the risks of drug use and on stabilizing the health of addicts with a multi-faceted series of measures such as safe injection sites, methadone maintenance programs, legal advice services, and assisted housing projects. Praising “Frankfurt’s path in drug politics” as a “role model for many municipalities at home and abroad,” the city administration highlights that its drug policy has the double effect of not only improving the situation of drug addicts but also contributing to the “protection of citizens.”1 Considering social and medical assistances for heroin users as measures to improve citizens’ security resonates in many ways with the long and complex history of controlling the city’s heroin scene. Since the 1970s, Frankfurt am Main, as well as many other cities across Europe, have had to cope with the increasing presence of heroin users in the urban public space. The consumption of so-called “hard drugs” such as heroin as well as its spatial manifestations, the public gatherings of drug-consuming youth in plain sight for passersby, attracted strong media attention and caused a moral panic about the radical delinquency of teenage heroin users. The local authorities in Frankfurt considered heroin addicts as both threats to urban security and ill persons in need of medical and psychological care, therefore necessitating not only criminal persecution by the police, but also social service measures by the city administration. Consequently, the logics of governing the heroin scene oscillated between coer1