Visitors arriving by rail in Germany's skyscraper-lined banking capital are often surprised to walk straight into a rough urban district replete with drug dealers and red-light businesses.
Public health officials argue that such measures have long helped desperate people suffering from addiction and saved many lives.
Local businessman Frank Lottermann, 56, who runs a design agency nearby, is lobbying for the new crack centre to be moved further away, to the other side of the railway lines.
“It does something to you” to have to step over human excrement on the way to work, he said. “It does something to your head.”
“The city is not just about drugs,“ Lottermann said. “Just this area!”
- 'Save lives' -
Its Bahnhofsviertel has been a red-light district since the post-war years, when US soldiers flocked there.
Germany's first drug consumption room opened there in 1996, modelled on similar services in Switzerland.
Today, three centres also provide addicts with food, beds and counselling.
Last year 20 people died of drug overdoses in Frankfurt, down from a peak of 147 in 1991. “Nobody has yet died of an overdose in a consumption room,“ Rupp said.
- 'Drug tourism' -
Local members of the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP) party this month called for the closure of the area's consumption rooms altogether.
Rupp insisted the new centre needs to be in the Bahnhofsviertel to be accessible to addicts, who he said are “ill”.
One crack user, a 43-year-old former tree surgeon named Stirpan, agreed.
“People get the drugs and want to smoke them immediately, they don’t want to wait.”
Barth, who opened the area's first help centre in 1989, said he was no stranger to local opposition.
“It is important to talk to your neighbours,“ Barth said.
Lottermann, for his part, also argued that Frankfurt should tolerate small-time drug dealing within help centres, to remove the practice from the streets.
Stirpan, fiddling with his crack pipe, said it was hard to see what could be done to clean up the Bahnhofsviertel.
“The people here will do anything for a bit of crack.”
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