Jelle van Veen - first employee of De Regenboog Foundation (started as a field worker in 1975), director from 1990-1996
"I can still see him walking: Ron, a scrawny 16-year-old boy: heavily addicted. He lived with his mother in Amsterdam-Noord and went to town every day to get dope. Ron got money by stealing, car break-ins and such. I talked to him on the street and tried to build a relationship with him and from there see what would be best for Ron. First, you still want him to go to rehab. You start talking to his mother. But the pull is too strong. Then you try to take the edge off. With Ron, the main thing was that I kept in touch with him. I went with him to the hospital, to court, to his parents and to walk-ins. It was the 1980s. There were hundreds of guys like this running around town. Some made it, some didn't."
'Mr. Regenboog'
On the street, people knew Van Veen as "Mister Regenboog. A striking figure with big glasses and a big bunch of hair. He is one of the people of the first hour. He set up the fieldwork within The Regenboog and played an important role in establishing syringe exchange facilities in the city.
Van Veen moved to Amsterdam in late 1969 and began studying social work. In 1974 he worked among the hippies in the Vondelpark. That's how he ended up at De Regenboog. Van Veen knew all the places in the city. "I always loved wandering around Amsterdam. Still do. There are memories in every neighborhood. Many things I encountered on the street as a field worker got my attention. I was with everything. Methadone and heroin dispensing programs, a streetwalking zone, the Zeedijk as a drug concentration area, emotional neighborhood meetings in the city, the rise of AIDS, psychiatric care. Not to mention the syringe exchange."
Spout Exchange
Pretentious eyes betray nostalgia for a time when pioneering was on the edge. "We had no choice," Van Veen begins his story, which sounds like a boy's book. "Pharmacists in the city center stopped dispensing syringes. They had had enough of the massive influx of addicts. In 1984, together with the Junkie Union and the Amsterdam Drug Aid Foundation, we started exchanging syringes. This exchange took place in the afternoon, in the basement room of the Tabe Rienkshuis on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal. Through a door in Barndesteeg, thirty to sixty users came to the desk every day. Remarkably few problems occurred." In the month of March 1988, 17,658 syringes were exchanged at De Regenboog alone. "We had no maximum," Van Veen said. "Whoever brought in a hundred used syringes got a hundred clean ones."
Spout exchange at the Tabe Rienks House
.Years full of emotion
"It's almost impossible to imagine anymore," he continues, "but the 1980s were a turbulent time. The problems were not negligible. Nowadays, one drug death scares us; in that period, people were dying from drug use every week. That had to change. The question was how? Chasing addicts was not the way. We soon found that out. Evangelizing didn't work either. Even hammering on rehab quickly taught us not to. That only frustrated us: impossible work. The pull to the streets was too great. Helping control use proved far more effective than stopping use. Harm reduction, that was it. There had to be shelter, methadone dispensing, syringe exchange, a streetwalking zone, preferably also a meaningful daytime activity." All this came to pass. 1989 also saw the first - cautious - cooperation between social services, police and justice. Van Veen: "Worlds that were miles apart before 1980 grew closer over the years. This cooperation was and is very important."
Finished well
How did it actually end with Ron? "Well!" begins Van Veen, visibly pleased with the question. "Everyone had actually given up on him at the time; Ron was really heavily addicted. After a failed suicide attempt, in which he was covered in blood, I went with him to the hospital. A while after that, I got him working as a day care worker at a cheese farm in Heemskerk. He eventually met his current wife at a party. I went to the wedding in the Achterhoek, where he still lives and works. Ron became a roofer."
"Helping control usage turned out to be much more efficient than stopping usage. Harm reduction, that's what it was."
Jelle van Veen, begin jaren 70