This video looks at the impact of policing of recent drug markets, and drug consumption of public health and public safety. In an ideal world, law enforcement can be imagined as a kind of a silver bullet for society's drug problems. This is because drug enforcement is assumed to simultaneously protect public health by deterring consumption and public safely by pushing retail markets and drug consumption away from public spaces, as well as fighting organized crime by making a drug markets unattractive for criminal business. However, in the real world, research has so far not been able to confirm these positive effects of drug enforcement. Quite to the contrary, this research suggests that there are important trade-off between policing consumers, retail markets and drug supply. For example, research from Australia show the crackdown on open markets to discourage drug users from consuming drugs, nor retail sellers from selling them. Rather police actions against open drug markets seem to in the first place displays rather than to solve open drug retail markets lead to riskier consumption behavior especially in injecting drug users, lead to behavior in retail traffickers that can have a negative consequences on their health, and make access to harm reduction services more difficult, and disrupt the application of safer use rules. Research from Switzerland suggests that, at least statistically, there is a positive causal relationship between the intensity of street-level drug law enforcement and the mortality of drug users. This is a high price society has to pay for a potential increasing public safety. Especially if one considers that research so far has not shown the drug law enforcement does actually have an impact on local drug markets. Even large interventions such as large seizures don't seem to have a real effect on drug markets on prices, or purity. Also enforcement has no effect on drug market violence, and in some cases might even intensified. It remains unclear if drug law enforcement has any impact on the local level at least in the longer term. Needle Park in Zurich, one of the largest open drug scene that existed in Western Europe, is a good example for what can happen if open drug markets are being policed heavily. When the police crackdown on the Needle Parked in an attempt to restore public order the city, drug users did not simply vanish. They just moved to an abandoned train station close by where harm reduction services had less access. Drug use became riskier for the users, but this did not stop them from using. The results were more overdoses and HIV infections, more public consumption, and more petty crime in the residential areas surrounding the old train station. Instead of making the city more secure, the crackdown on the Needle Park has worsened and might even have prolonged the heroin crisis in Zurich. Despite this problematic consequences, it's very likely that drug law enforcement will remain an important part of most drug policies around the world in the future. We should therefore ask ourselves how policing can be better integrated in health-based drug policies than just calling for abandoning them. The question is therefore not how policing is helping to solve societies drug problem, but how the police can actually contribute to dealing with drug consumption, retail markets, and political expectations towards public safety in a socially acceptable way. Drug consumption rules or safe injection facilities in Switzerland are a good example for illustrating this problem. Their establishment creates important tensions between the police and to social workers or agencies who are running these consumption rules. As it's obvious a drug user frequenting consumption rooms, are carrying drugs, are consuming them and that there's stealing going on into consumption rooms. This is a fact that many police officers find hard to accept. Nevertheless, over the years police and the agencies running drug consumption rooms have developed routines which regulate what police can do around and under certain circumstances also in consumption rooms. These routines are necessary to run the facility smoothly. Guiding these routines is the common interest of police and public health to protect the health of drug users as good as possible introduce public consumption to minimum at the same time. In order to do so, drug consumption rooms must be able to operate especially in cities. Too much police interference puts smooth operations at risk. However, none puts the acceptance of the consumption room in the neighborhoods also at risks. So, both sides have to find a way how to deal with each others' and how to deal with the consumption room that somehow doesn't really fit into the log must be operated sustainably. Finding this equilibrium between these two requirements is key for consumption rooms to work. It is by cooperation that policing contributes to drug policies health outcomes