At the annual Commission on Narcotic Drugs meeting earlier this year, the Russian-language blog DUNews had the chance to give a guided tour showing how Vienna's fire, police, and social care services and hospitals make coordinated efforts to address the Austrian capital's urban drug problems.
The Vienna Center for Integrated Support is a big five-story building in the downtown area, with 270 clients a day receiving services in the drop-in center, and 535 clients exchanging 10,000 syringes every day.
Here, clients can also see hepatologists, respiratory therapists, gynecologists, cardiologists, and psychiatrists (in Europe, there are no narcologists; the psychiatrist here performs the same functions as narcologists elsewhere). They can talk to social workers, be attended to by nurses specially trained to work with drug users, get tested for HIV and hepatitis, eat hot meals, spend a night in a comfortable room, do their laundry, or read books. Furthermore, homeless clients can enroll for a program to help them find jobs and safe shelter for a temporary period.
In Austria, there are about 29,000 drug-dependent people; roughly 12,000 of them live in Vienna. About 40 percent of drug-dependent people in Austria use injection drugs. Over 6,000 are clients of opioid substitution treatment (OST) programs, and roughly 1,000 OST clients are over 50 years of age. The oldest client in the methadone program is 82 years old.
Read the full report on Drugreporter.