The Senate report on the “impact of drug trafficking in France and the measures to be taken to remedy it” will give rise to a bill this Wednesday, January 22. The Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, and the Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, are making numerous shocking announcements on this subject. However, after years of increasing power of the legal and police system, the number of victims of score-settling and the tonnes of goods imported into the territory are not decreasing. How to explain it? How to fix it?
Settling of scores, net operations, spectacular seizures, announcement of a new bill to better fight against drug trafficking, recent news makes evident the expansion of the latter throughout the French territory.
A National Plan to Combat Narcotics was implemented in 2019. But the Senate Commission of Inquiry into the Impact of Drug Trafficking in France, whose conclusions were released in May 2024, draws up an assessment of the failure of recent anti-drug policies. This seems particularly obvious in the fight against trafficking.
A penal arsenal aimed at punishing the leaders of criminal groups involved in drug trafficking, the illicit production and/or manufacture of narcotics, the illicit export and/or import of narcotics, as well as the transport, detention, illicit supply, transfer, acquisition or use of narcotics, but, according to figures provided by the Ministry of Justice, in 2020, procedures for offenses against narcotics legislation concerned essentially the use, and not the trafficking of narcotics.
How can we explain this discrepancy between existing systems and the results obtained? The deployment of new methods of distributing prohibited substances, the persistence of vulnerabilities, particularly at ports, and a certain number of illusions about the functioning of organized crime constitute some elements of the response.
Read more: France at the heart of drug trafficking: a geopolitical perspective
Increased accessibility to narcotics
Despite having one of the most repressive arsenals in Europe, France has for years been one of the countries with the largest consumers of narcotics. Stéphanie Cherbonnier, former director of Ofast (Anti-narcotics Office, the agency responsible for coordinating the fight against drug trafficking on French territory), estimated in 2022 at 900,000 daily cannabis users and 600,000 people who have used cocaine in France. We could consider that demand creates supply but this would be to misunderstand the specificity of addictive substances. In reality, the growing supply flows through elaborate marketing strategies.
Lou Benoist/AFP
Cocaine, in particular, has become extremely available, with coca cultivation in Latin America having reached a peak in 2023. Result: significant quantities of narcotics to be sold in a context of saturation of the American market.
Europe and France have become a target for drug traffickers able to offer a very pure drug and at lower prices than in the past. Previously considered the drug of the elite, cocaine has become democratized.
Criminal networks have learned lessons from the 2020 health lockdown. Forced to develop alternative methods to the traditional point of sale to supply the end consumer, they have turned to social networks and home deliveries. Initially artisanal, these practices have literally become professionalized.
They made it possible to reach new users from a geographical and social point of view while playing on addiction. Where the fact of traveling to a deal point with the inherent risks of arrest, identification, aggression, constituted a barrier for some, delivery via telephone applications and social networks disinhibits certain people and brings them closer together. narcotics from potential consumers.
-This “Uberization” also relies on very offensive marketing aimed at maintaining the consumption impulse: reminders by SMS, loyalty programs, promotional offers, samples of new products to test reinforce consumption that is already captive by nature. At the same time, these circuits partly make traffic invisible, making the networks more flexible, multiple and difficult to identify by law enforcement.
Lack of control over the flow of goods
Before reaching the final consumer, narcotics generally travel via international routes. The raw material is often geographically very localized: coca can only be cultivated on the Andean plateau, the poppy for opium and heroin comes mainly from South-East Asia, cannabis plantations are spreading but a part non-marginal comes from the Maghreb. Even the chemicals used to manufacture synthetic drugs have localized production basins, particularly in China. Drug trafficking piggybacks on international trade and exploits its vulnerabilities.
The vast majority of international flows pass through sea routes. Ports are therefore on the front line. Where net operations temporarily restore public order but only allow modest quantities of narcotics to be seized, the quantities seized in ports and on major roads are massive. However, in European ports, only 2% of goods are subject to checks. This provides a high probability of moving illegal goods without interception.
This lack of control over the flow of goods is the result of a political choice, that of favoring economic efficiency to the detriment of security. Liberalism seeks the greatest possible fluidity in the circulation of goods. This speed is seen as a competitive advantage. In this logic, control, particularly customs, constitutes a grain of sand slowing down the machine. However, better control of entry points into our territory such as ports and logistics hubs is essential to effectively combat the flow of illegal goods (narcotics, but also counterfeits, weapons, protected species, etc.).
The “illusion of knowledge”
Combating drug trafficking also requires moving away from the “illusion of knowledge” that too often characterizes political decision-makers. The criminal world is dynamic, it evolves according to economic opportunities (with new trafficking), technological (via encrypted messaging for example) and legal (by circumventing the legislation on prohibited substances via the permanent invention of new synthetic drugs ).
We must be humble and accept that what we knew or thought we knew about criminal networks one day is no longer valid the next. This approach must be based on a criminal intelligence effort, which presupposes training in particular in criminology, a discipline currently not recognized in France, unlike neighboring countries such as Italy, the United Kingdom or Switzerland. The expansion of organized crime as a whole deserves that researchers dedicate themselves to studying the nature, causes, consequences and means of combating this phenomenon.
These inadequacies are revealed in the recurrent use, by politicians, of erroneous terms such as monopole, octopus or narcommafia to discuss drug trafficking in France. Drug trafficking today relies on a myriad of criminal organizations, larger or smaller, cooperating far more often than the settling of scores shows. So there is not an octopus to be decapitated. The term mafia designates a very specific criminal reality going well beyond drug trafficking and developing from its birth activities both in the legal and illegal sphere with a hold on the economy, politics and society. Reducing the notion of mafia to that of drug trafficking is therefore an error in diagnosis.
Understanding the extreme diversity of criminal organizations, identifying them, naming them, understanding their interactions and especially their hierarchy is urgent for repressive action targeting leading players and not small hands. To do this, a change of outlook is necessary: not focusing on drug trafficking and taking into account the overall criminal threat of actors, many of whom have developed multiple criminal activities involving, for example, arms trafficking, human trafficking, environmental or other crime depending on economic opportunities and relationships with other criminal organizations.
