This puzzles me. The Medication Assisted Treatment (metadone and buprenorphine) started in 1991. The Heroin Assisted Treatment (HAT) started in 1994. People that failed the MAT were enroled into the HAT.
Limited first HAT experiments were found sucessful, and thus expanded in 1999. In 2008 both approaches entered the law.
The opioid/heroin epidemic that hit the whole Europe, took place in the 80's, with AIDS making it worse at later 80's and early 90's, causing all countries in Europe to tackle the problem hard starting in the early 90's. Yet you claim that HAT not only was shutdown in early 90's but that it was the thing that created the mess.
Dates don't add up, sorry. Maybe you are talking about a different swiss experiment, and not the internationally famous HAT.
The first phase of the experiment was to have a free zone in the Platzspitz park, with a needle exchanges, and no interference to drug sales and use. The park became known as "needle park."
They shut it down in '92, which led to junkies spreading throughout the city, particularly on and around Langstrasse.
It wasn't until a real crackdown that things got better. They tried a few approaches like the treatments you mentioned, but that's very different than the laissez-faire decriminalization experiment that blew up in everyone's face.
There's a good documentary or article about the whole thing I meant to recommend but I can't find it at the moment.
When a non-Swiss person talks about "the Swiss heroing/drug experiment", they are referring specifically to the HAT program, and not to a free-for-drug park.
It's obvious that if you put all the junkies of a county in a single park, without even the minimal hygienic measures, you create a mess. That's not laissez-faire, that's a mess, but to their credit at least they tried something different than the cycle "heroin user -> scum to jail or to cemetery". It would happen with anything imaginable: "now all homeless are allowed in the Platzspitz Park and nowhere else", a month later the park is covered with homeless trash to nobody's surprise.
The HAT is a step further (not backward) in decriminalization: you are hooked to heroin, metadone doesn't work. But you are not a criminal, and thus we will take a medical approach.
Yes, the Platzspitz/Letten scenes were awful, but these are not what the post that you were initially were responding to was describing.
> It wasn’t until a real crackdown that things got better.
Yes, there was a crackdown, but it’s not like this hadn’t been done numerous times before, both in Switzerland and in other countries, so this hardly could have been the major cause of the permanent improvement (which I think we both agree did indeed occur around that time).
> They tried […] the treatments you mentioned
And THOSE were the new factor, and THAT is what made the difference. The Heroin assisted treatment is still in force (an article a few years ago mentioned that about 1400 addicts in Switzerland are in the program).