Elderly junkies find 'real freedom' at Dutch home_美文

Elderly junkies find 'real freedom' at Dutch home

In a tiny fourth-floor room overlooking The Hague's city center, a gray-haired man carefully plugged a small pipe with a ball of cocaine, lit up and drew a deep breath.

"This is real freedom," said 65-year-old William as a billow of white smoke poured from his nostrils and wafted through his apartment at Woodstock, the only Dutch home for elderly junkies and other addicts.

The apartment block, flanked by a canal and a tram line, takes a unique approach to drug abuse by helping to keep aging homeless people off the city's streets and out of trouble with the law.

"I like it here. Here there is no police watching you," William said as he rearranged the paraphernalia of his addiction on a small table: a pipe, a lighter, a mirror with traces of cocaine lines and an old credit card. "I can do what I want to do."

His hard-luck story is similar to that of the 32 other "older" drug and alcohol-dependent residents, including three women, who live at Woodstock, a drab brown apartment block a stone's throw from the city center.

After 33 years of hard living in Spain, where he picked up a cocaine habit while working in hospitality, William returned to the Netherlands two years ago, hoping to rebuild contact with his estranged family.

But instead of enjoying a reunion, he was viciously attacked by two youths at a local homeless shelter, receiving a beating that cost him his left eye and which left part of his face paralyzed.