In the newspaper Sudinfo of 17 June, Diana Nikolic, Walloon MP, states that the scheme has not lived up to its promises. She looks back on the hearings held at the Walloon Parliament at the initiative of the MR group: while the room has prevented overdoses, “with a million euros of public money injected every year, that's the least it could do…”, says the MP, it has not calmed public spaces nor enabled users to escape addiction.
The experts heard agree unanimously: elsewhere it works. But where it works, there is a vision, and financial and human resources are aligned with the objectives. The Liège consumption room could have been a gateway towards support in overcoming addiction, but for Diana Nikolic, in Liège: “they built the door before the house”.
Diana Nikolic therefore calls for a genuine overall, integrated and coherent strategy to be built, involving every sector: health, social affairs, police, justice… and every level of government.
And the room, is it stop or carry on? The question doesn't arise in those terms. The room must not be an end in itself, but could possibly be a tool. “Let's build the house, with solid foundations, and then we'll see whether the entry point needs to be a consumption room. Once we know what we want to do and how, we'll see whether the drug consumption room is part of the solution,” concludes the MP.