Tipping point: How drug trafficking became
a ‘national cause’ in France
France is grappling with an alarming surge in drug-related violence, from grisly murders in Marseille to deadly clashes in smaller towns. As criminal networks thrive, the government has declared the fight against trafficking a "national cause" – but experts warn the crisis may be spiralling beyond the control of law enforcement.
Marseille - Already a NARCO city
Reports of drug-related violence have littered French headlines in recent weeks. A teenage boy was stabbed 50 times and burned alive in a drug-related killing in Marseille last month. A few days later, a 36-year-old football player was shot in cold blood by a minor. The murders both took place in Marseille, the country’s second-largest city, but also one of its poorest – and currently the epicentre of gang violence linked to drug trafficking.
But smaller cities, towns and even rural areas are also seeing unprecedented violence linked to drug trafficking and the settling of scores. An incident in Rennes in northwestern France left a 5-year-old with bullet injuries on October 26 while in Poitiers, home to about 90,000 inhabitants, a 15-year-old boy died after being shot in the head during a bloody duel between drug gangs on October 31.
The spike in cases of fatal violence around drug dealing has even prompted the Marseille courts to coin a new catch-all term, “narcohomicide”, to describe people killed in situations linked to drug trafficking, sometimes for simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
France’s former interior minister Gérald Darmanin dubbed drug trafficking the “greatest threat to national unity” this past May. And the current government has continued to take a hard line on the issue since coming to power in June.
Current Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau said on November 1 that the situation in France had reached a “tipping point”. The country faces an ultimatum, he said: “full mobilisation” or “Mexicanisation”– a term used to describe the scale of drug trafficking in France that risks reaching levels similar to those in Mexico, where drug-related violence is rampant in some areas.
The fight against the drug trade has now become a “national cause”, according to both Retailleau and Justice Minister Didier Migaud, who spoke out on the issue in Marseille last week.
State of affairs
After a six-month-long investigation, a Senate commission of inquiry released a report in May of this year that took stock of the situation in France and issued recommendations. The findings were damning. It described some areas of the country as being “submerged” while drug trafficking had gotten an “insidious foothold that is developing daily” in others.
The alarm bells sounded by French authorities seem to resonate with the general public. Crime and violence are a top worry for French people, according to a report carried out by Ipsos in September. And three-quarters of 1,019 people surveyed by YouGov in November reported being “concerned” by drug trafficking in the country.
“It is definitely a real concern for people living in low-income neighbourhoods, who are on the front line of violence,” affirmed Marie Jauffret-Roustide, a French sociologist at the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (Inserm) and member of the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA) scientific committee.
“But that has always been the case,” Jauffret-Roustide explained. “What is different now is that the violence has spread to small and medium-sized cities, even semi-rural areas.”
Drug-related violence took the lives of 49 people in Marseille alone last year – a record high according to news agency AFP and the city’s public prosecutor. But there has been a significant decline this year, with 17 deaths recorded since the start of 2024 to early October.
Marseille is the most densely populated area of Muslim immigrants in France. This is not a coincidence!
To compare, between April and March 2023 in the UK, 1,627 homicides recorded by the police were drug-related, according to the current definition of drug-related homicide at the Office for National Statistics.
But business is booming. Criminal groups are thriving off an illicit market that is estimated to bring in more than €3.5 billion annually in France alone. And on the ground, trafficking networks have changed their business models and become more skilled at distributing cheaply and rapidly.
In November 2023, French police chief Frédéric Veaux said “traffickers are operating under an economic logic that I would describe as capitalist and ultraliberal, with a constant desire of conquering and developing markets”.
“The big winners are the people closest to production,” affirmed Jauffret-Roustide. But the “little hands” who go out to deliver the illegal substances to consumers “earn very little”, are “very young” and are those “most likely to experience drug-related violence first hand”, she said.
To draw an exhaustive picture of the state of affairs in the country, researchers also factor in police seizures and consumption surveys.
“The use of legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol has been decreasing steadily in recent decades,” explained Jean-Pierre Couteron, a clinical psychologist specialising in addiction. Cannabis use, on the other hand, has remained stable since 2017, according to the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Trends (OFDT).
But the use of narcotics like cocaine has “significantly increased”, the OFDT found. Moreover, 50 percent more French adults between 18 and 64 reported having consumed an illicit substance other than cannabis at least once since 2017.
Cannabis and cocaine are the drugs most consumed by the French population.
“Consumption levels are higher than they should be,” said Couteron. “But there is nothing [to signal] that we are a kind of Mexico,” he added.
I would suggest that everything mentioned above signals that France is a kind of Mexico.
Drug seizures in 2022 also reached an all-time high in France, according to the ministry of the interior.
And when it comes to production, substances like cocaine have also hit record highs. This, coupled with the “acceleration of globalisation”, makes for fertile ground for a thriving illegal market, said Couteron.
A growing market and failing approach
France is a crossroads for drug routes and a prime geographical location for traffickers. Cannabis flows into the country from Morocco through Spain while cocaine comes in from South American countries like Peru, Colombia and Bolivia through the ports of northern Europe like Antwerp or Rotterdam or Le Havre, a city in the north of France.
But newer smuggling routes for cocaine are also being increasingly exploited by traffickers in recent years. “We have cocaine that comes from French Guyana,” explained Jauffret-Roustide. “Poor people who think they can earn some quick money by being mules,” often ingesting balloons of illicit substances and transporting them by plane. “But in fact, it’s an extremely dangerous business,” she said.
Once in France, it has also become easier than ever to access drugs. Phone numbers of dealers can be found on stickers pasted around cities, dealers are using marketing techniques and promotions through applications like Snapchat, WhatsApp and Telegram. And since the COVID-19 pandemic, home deliveries have become more commonplace. An “uberisation” of the business model has made buying drugs as easy as ordering pizza.
While the price of drugs has remained relatively stable, their purity has spiked. The average THC (main psychoactive compound) content in cannabis resin has more than doubled in 10 years, according to the OFDT. The same can be said of cocaine, which is significantly more pure than it was a decade ago.
A ‘naïve’ war on drug trafficking
France has not managed to curb drug trafficking even though successive governments have spent decades fighting the war on drugs. “Not only is our country at a tipping point,” read the Senate report published last year, “but above all, the State’s response lacks resources, clarity and coherence”.
Couteron has observed the consequences of France’s prohibitionist stance on drug trafficking for decades. While he agrees that the State has not done enough, he does not believe injecting more resources into police forces or the justice system will do the trick.
“This war on drug trafficking troubles me because of how naïve it is,” admitted Couteron. “[Drug trafficking] is a market that has grown … And since the market has not been managed by the French state, but by mafias and gangs, it has become what it is now – something violent and dramatic.”
“We need to take a closer look at consumer behaviour … There will always be drug users looking for substances, but it is not their responsibility to manage the market,” said Couteron.
Yet putting the onus on consumers seems to be part of the French government’s plan of attack. Interior Minister Retailleau announced wanting to target consumers of narcotics during government questions at the Senate on October 23.
“[This prohibitionist logic is] based on the fact that if you scare consumers by telling them there will be higher penalties for using illegal substances, they will stop,” said Jauffret-Roustide. “But in fact, scientific studies have shown that the reasons why people use drugs are more complicated. The law has little influence on consumer behaviour.”
The sociologist believes “examining and creating favourable contexts” to help limit consumption, “especially among young people” – like creating programmes that focus on benefitting the general psychological and physical wellbeing of young adults, as Iceland successfully managed to do – is “more useful” than prohibitive regimes.
For now, however, a beefed-up government response with a penchant for law and order seems to be what is on the horizon.
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