Cities that allow the most destructive of human behavior to take over the public space are cities where civilized life as we know it is being marginalized and forced to give way to social fragmentation. Dignity yields to savagery.
Europe has a long tradition of fighting narcotic drugs, with varying results. In 1992, the city of Zürich, Switzerland, closed the infamous ‘Needle Park’ area, just behind the national museum and the central railway station. For a few years in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
hundreds of dealers and addicts packed into the park, [with] many people desperately needing urgent medical care on a daily basis.
As a curious tourist, I visited the place about a year before it was closed. I was shocked at the complete and utter lack of dignity among those who basically spent their entire lives there. Human beings had turned into empty shells, consumed and hollowed out by their addiction to something that was certain to kill them.
