70 years ago, a detention facility opened in Prague. The first client was a Russian sailor Home
The Prague interception, which was originally scheduled to operate for only three months, was empty for only three days. The first “client” became a Russian naval engineer on May 18, 1951. The ambulance proved its worth, and following its example, similar facilities were established throughout Czechoslovakia and in the world, and, for example, a detention center in St. Louis has it written in the charter.
“It simply came to our notice then. Nowhere else in the world was it primarily a medical and preventive facility. Elsewhere, it was more of a repressive facility, “said Petr Popov, the current head of the Addictology Clinic years ago. According to Russian sources, however, a detention center was opened in the Russian city of Tula as early as 1902.
|
For the first time, the idea of setting up a detention center came from members of the Rock-Based Club for Sober (KLUS). The alcoholics knew very well how a drunk could end up on the street. “The police were glad to have a place to get drunk, but they continued to beat them there for no reason. Needless to say, because you don’t feel it anyway. In the end, we introduced training for men in uniform, but there were also cases where we had to sue.
On the other hand, we often went to the rug after the influential comrades who came to us, ”Skála recalled. “The detention center, it was an extremely humanistic device at the time, until then the drunks and rioters came to the police cells, where they either died of a brain hemorrhage or something like that, or they insulted public officials for whom then they had to cry hard, “described the beginnings of the station of another legend of the fight against alcoholism Karel Nespor, today the emeritus head of the male addiction department of the Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital.
Plumbers and authors of children’s verses
The peculiarity of the detention was that the patients themselves took care of the arrivals so that they could understand what it was like for their surroundings when they arrived somewhere in a similar condition. Other interesting features of the capture at Apolinář included, as Jaroslav Skála said with a bit of exaggeration, that the most numerous professions were plumbers, and immediately after them the authors of verses for children were placed. One of the sadly happy moments was that many of the patients’ relatives carried the staff on an improved bottle of alcohol. And what does one of the staff’s favorite jokes sound like? “The lady wakes up after a half-day-old monkey in the trap, stares at the bare walls, and shouts, ‘Dad, they robbed us’!”
The care at the detention center under the supervision of a doctor is currently not covered by the public insurance system (except for medical services) and clients should pay for their stay on their own. According to the law, they are the founder of anti-alcohol and anti-drug detention centers in the region.
The golden period for “interceptions” was the beginning of the 1980s, when there were 63 of them in operation in Czechoslovakia. In recent years, according to statistics from the Institute of Health Information and Statistics (IHIS), the number of patients in detention centers has fallen from 30,487 in 2010 to 23,744 in 2019. Eighty percent of patients are men. According to the IHIS, there are 18 detention centers in the Czech Republic. With four detention centers, the Moravian-Silesian Region ranks first, the Central Bohemian Region manages two and the capital city of Prague, for example, has one.
The detention center at Apolinář first moved to the Na Míčankách complex and in March 2004 a new detention center was opened in the Na Bulovce Hospital complex. Some time ago, the city raised the price for staying at the station to 3,000 crowns, before that it was 1,950 CZK. According to the founder, which has been the Municipal Polyclinic since 2013, only a quarter of clients will pay for their sleep, and since 2013 the station has registered debts in the total amount of about 60 million crowns. A large proportion of clients are homeless. The Department of Addictology is now located on the site of the original detention at Apolinář.