Yesterday (Sunday), I ended up going to a Christmas concert in Frankfurt, at the old Opera Haus.
Since I'm not all happy driving into Frankfurt.....I made the decision to take the local train from near my village....into the heart of Frankfurt (the Hauptbahnhof)....the main station. It's a 37-minute ride.
When you arrive in Frankfurt....you are at least two hundred feet below the surface and deep under the station itself. You have to walk through a couple of tunnels to reach the level for your next leg of the journey.
So I'm walking along and here are three German guys on some sleeping bag....laying on the side of the tunnel, and preparing their next hit of heroin. They've got the syringes and getting things all prepared. Yeah....there's probably a dozen Germans a minute walking by the three guys.....watching this....and they keep walking.
Back in 1978, when I first got to Germany....you could walk through any part of the train station in Frankfurt, and you didn't have stuff like this. Cops were around....the station management wanted to keep things clean. In the mid-1980s....you could see changes coming. By the early 1990s....with the Wall gone and cops looking the other way....hard-core drug usage got introduced into Frankfurt.
If you regularly use the Frankfurt station....on a weekly basis....you will probably walk by at least five or six episodes of guys doing their drug business. It's an accepted part of the city scene now.
No desire to fix this? I would speculate that they've discussed the matter and came to the conclusion that if you flush the rats out of this tunnel....they will simply move to another tunnel, or eventually to the nicer neighborhoods of Frankfurt, or perhaps even next to the Messe (the show halls of the city). So, they just leave it alone and let it go.
Dangerous? No. Other than some guy overdosing or having a bad experience....there's not much of a danger.
So if you haven't ever seen guys doing heroin.....just take a walk through the Frankfurt subway system.
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