The spokesperson for Europe-Écologie-Les Verts in PACA, Hassen Hammou, announced his support for the opening of a shooting room in the famous Marseille basilica, although the idea has not yet been not gathered more than a hundred petitioners.
After the idea of a shooting room (the popular name by which we designate addiction treatment centers, HSA) planned on Boulevard de la Libération was finally abandoned, to the great dismay of the project’s supporters, an online petition now proposes to open an HSA inside the Notre-Dame de la Garde basilica in Marseille.
The previous experiment, which planned the opening of a drug consumption place for addicts in a premises located in the city center of Marseille, was finally put on hold on January 17 due to reservations from the Ministry of Health .
The debates surrounding the installation of this shooting room had taken a political turn, spreading beyond the streets of 4e district and becoming a real endorsement for many opponents of the town hall, particularly on the right. At the end of December, during a press conference, the president of the Aix-Marseille-Provence metropolis Martine Vassal even called on mayor Benoît Payan to abandon the project.
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This time Nicolas Thomasset, who launched this petition, has therefore chosen to propose a solution that is, to say the least, iconoclastic. “I understood that the different institutions had problems finding a place. As I regularly go to Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde to pray and it is a place that has space, I thought of proposing that it be done there. It would take several”he declared on BFM Marseille-Provence. He believes that this solution constitutes a decisive response to a problem of “public health”adding: “Every day, we come across dependent people whose survival depends on medical supervision”.
Guest of BFM Marseille Provence this Friday, October 18, Hassen Hammou, spokesperson for EELV Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, gave his support to the initiative. He notably declared: “I do not know the technical difficulties at the level of the Basilica to be able to host such an activity (…) What we are saying is that the project must come back to the table, it is interesting and necessary. The medical world is more or less in agreement that we should talk about it again and try to see where in the city it can be implemented.”
The petition, entitled “let’s transform the Good Mother into an HSA”, has so far only collected 110 signatures.
