European cities are facing growing problems with homelessness, poverty and public drug use. One important reason is the increasing availability of cocaine. According to the latest figures from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), record amounts of cocaine are being seized in Europe. While larger seizures may seem like a success for law enforcement, they also indicate that unprecedented quantities of cocaine are entering European ports. One explanation is that the North American cocaine market has become increasingly saturated. As a result, traffickers have shifted their focus towards Europe. Germany has become one of the destinations of this growing cocaine trade. The consequences are visible: cocaine has become cheaper, purer and easier to obtain than ever before. At the same time, German cities are witnessing a sharp increase in crack cocaine consumption. Frankfurt am Main knows what a drug crisis looks like. During the heroin epidemic of the 1980s, the city became synonymous with open drug use, overdose deaths and HIV infections. Back then, Frankfurt responded with a radical change in drug policy. The question today is whether this model—the famous Frankfurter Weg—can once again offer solutions, this time for a rapidly growing crack epidemic.

The increasing availability of cocaine has consequences that go far beyond the drug itself. Crack cocaine, which is produced from cocaine, has become increasingly common on the streets of German cities. Outreach workers, healthcare providers and social institutions report growing numbers of crack users seeking support, while municipalities struggle to respond. Unlike heroin, crack is typically consumed in short intervals. The intense but short-lived high leads users to consume repeatedly throughout the day. As a result, addiction can develop quickly and public consumption becomes far more visible than with many other substances. This visibility has contributed to growing concerns about safety, homelessness and public disorder in many European cities.

Frankfurt experienced a comparable crisis more than forty years ago. Throughout the 1980s, the city’s station district became the centre of Germany’s heroin scene. Rising numbers of overdose deaths and HIV infections made it increasingly clear that a purely repressive approach had failed. In 1989, Frankfurt fundamentally changed its strategy. Instead of relying primarily on criminal prosecution, the city embraced harm reduction. This approach became known as the Frankfurter Weg. Its key principles included addiction prevention, counselling, therapy and numerous programmes designed to help people leave addiction behind. These initiatives, known collectively as Brücken aus dem Bahnhofsviertel (“Bridges out of the Station District”), aimed not only to reduce drug use but also to reintegrate people into society.

Another milestone followed in 1994 with Germany’s first legal drug consumption room. Here, heroin users could obtain sterile equipment and consume drugs under medical supervision. The results were remarkable. Fatal overdoses declined dramatically—from 147 deaths in 1991 to around 25 annually today. The Frankfurter Weg is therefore widely regarded as one of Germany’s most successful examples of harm reduction. But while it proved highly effective during the heroin epidemic, today’s crack epidemic presents entirely new challenges.

What My Research Shows

As part of my anthropological fieldwork, I have been examining how the Frankfurter Weg responds to the growing number of crack users. Through interviews with outreach workers and people working directly with addicted individuals, I wanted to understand whether Frankfurt’s current system is still suited to today’s realities. Two issues emerged repeatedly: the trigger effect and structural violence.

The first concerns the environment in which treatment takes place. Researchers such as Werse et al. (2018) describe how people suffering from addiction often associate particular places with drug consumption. Simply entering these environments can trigger intense cravings, even after long periods of abstinence. In Frankfurt, this presents a major dilemma. For decades, the station district has been the centre of the city’s open drug scene. At the same time, many important support services—including Eastside and Drogenhilfe e.V.—are located in exactly this neighbourhood. People seeking help therefore have to enter the very environment that often triggers the urge to consume drugs. This raises an important question: how effective can treatment be if reaching the counselling centre already means confronting one of the strongest triggers for relapse?

Another recurring theme in my interviews was the difficulty of returning to everyday life after addiction. People participating in reintegration programmes repeatedly described how difficult it is to find housing or employment. Many also experience discrimination simply because of their history of addiction. Anthropologist Philippe Bourgois describes these wider social conditions as structural violence. Drug addiction cannot be understood solely as an individual failure. Instead, it develops and persists within social structures that make recovery significantly more difficult.

The poverty surrounding Frankfurt Central Station therefore cannot simply be explained by poor individual decisions. It is also a consequence of barriers to housing, healthcare, employment and social acceptance.

If the Frankfurter Weg successfully addressed the heroin epidemic, how can it evolve to confront crack cocaine? One possibility is to learn from other countries. Portugal experienced one of Europe’s worst heroin crises during the 1990s. In response, the country decriminalised the possession of small amounts of drugs in 2001 and shifted towards a health-centred approach. Instead of imprisonment, users were directed to medical treatment, psychological counselling and social support. Among many positive outcomes, HIV infections related to injecting drug use fell dramatically. A similar nationwide reform would likely be politically unrealistic in Germany. Nevertheless, several ideas that resemble Portugal´s way are discussed by practitioners could strengthen Frankfurt’s existing approach.

The proposal mentioned most frequently during my interviews was drug checking. Drug checking allows users to analyse substances before consumption. Dangerous chemicals or additives mixed into substances can be identified and drug purity measured, enabling users to make more informed decisions and potentially reducing overdoses and other health risks.

Another promising approach is substitution therapy. While heroin users have long benefited from substitutes such as methadone, no widely accepted substitute currently exists for crack cocaine. The Swiss city of Geneva is now preparing a pilot project testing pharmaceutical cocaine as a possible substitution treatment for heavily addicted crack users. Researchers across Europe are closely watching the project, hoping it may provide new options for treatment.

A New Challenge for the Frankfurter Weg

Frankfurt once demonstrated that a city does not have to rely solely on punishment to respond to a drug crisis. The Frankfurter Weg showed that harm reduction can save lives, reduce overdose deaths and improve public health. Today’s crack epidemic, however, differs fundamentally from the heroin crisis of the 1980s. New consumption patterns, different social dynamics and increasing cocaine availability – leading to lower prices and higher purity – require new approaches. Whether through drug checking, innovative substitution therapies or changes to the location and organisation of addiction services, Frankfurt once again has to rethink its drug policy. The city’s previous success was built on its willingness to adapt. As crack consumption continues to rise across Germany, the real challenge is not whether the Frankfurter Weg should change—but how. The war on drugs is lost, now we may have to adapt using more radical approaches in order to save innocent lives.