
Drugs: Brussels opens a supervised consumption room
Brussels, Belgium, May 2022 – As part of an approach to drugs based on harm reduction, and resulting from years of preparatory work by the City of Brussels…
Drug consumption and trafficking and their harmful effects on health, urban security and social cohesion pose a significant challenge to European cities, which face evolving drug markets and new challenges in terms of sanctioning and countering such traffic.
Among the problems caused by consumption and trafficking at the local level are the fact that vulnerable groups tend to gather in deprived neighbourhoods, where risky behaviours in public spaces are also more prevalent. Other issues are the impact of new technologies on local drug trafficking, and conflicts and polarisation around drugs combined with stigmatisation and fear.
Since it was founded in 1987, Efus has been providing local elected officials and practitioners, in particular municipal health and security services, with a pan-European forum for exchange among peers on prevention and harm reduction policies as part of urban security.
Efus considers that local and regional authorities play and must play an important role in drug policies because they are on the front line, facing local security and social cohesion issues linked to drug consumption and trafficking. There are many approaches to reduce risks linked to drugs and local and regional authorities are well placed to design multidisciplinary strategies to reduce such risks.
Efus advocates drug policies that are practical and geared towards reducing the risks caused by drug consumption on the health, social well-being and security of individuals, local communities and society. Such strategies should be designed based on the specific needs of each city and region and be easily adjustable to the rapidly evolving policies on and phenomenology of drugs.
In a resolution published in 2018, Efus supports supervised consumption rooms, which have shown ‘promising results in several European countries’.
Discover the actions implemented in communities across Europe through our summary documents, which present the key elements of each of these initiatives, including their context, objectives, activities, budget, evaluation. All of our practice and summary sheets can be found on Efus Network.
Brussels, Belgium, May 2022 – As part of an approach to drugs based on harm reduction, and resulting from years of preparatory work by the City of Brussels…
July 2021 – The City of Strasbourg, the Pompidou Group of the Council of Europe and the Ithaque Association, which manages Strasbourg’s Argos Low-Risk Drug Consumption Room, in…
Maintaining the momentum in the face of major challenges of the 21st-century Thursday 1 July 2021 – Hemicycle of the Council of Europe – Strasbourg The European Forum…
The project’s final conference The SOLIDIFY European project held its final conference in Lisbon (PT) on 5 and 6 December 2019. Co-organised with the European Monitoring Centre for…
SOLIDIFY Project Supervised Drug Consumption Facilities to Instill Harm Reduction and Social Cohesion at Local Levels Drug use and its potential detrimental effects on public health, urban security…
Objectives The overall objective of the SOLIDIFY project was to give cities that host an SDCF specific tools that would enable them to support the organisations that are…
Efus advocates SDCFs in a political resolution adopted by its executive committee In November 2018, Efus’ executive committee convened in Amiens (FR) adopted a resolution advocating a local…
Local activities SOLIDIFY analysed the experiences gathered by the project’s partner cities throughout the local audit and implementation phases. A first set of cities – Barcelona, The Hague,…
Study visits SOLIDIFY conducted study visits to all five partner cities that operate supervised drug consumption rooms (Barcelona, Essen, Paris, Strasbourg, and The Hague). The overall objective of…
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