It was a week of crime chronicle where horror and banality intertwine. For a few days, at the end of October and the beginning of November, tragedies linked to drug trafficking followed one another from one side of France to the other. A 5-year-old child injured in the head by a stray bullet in Rennes; an 18-year-old man and another 22-year-old killed during two attacks near nightclubs in Drôme; a 15-year-old boy died of a gunshot to the head in front of a kebab shop in Poitiers.
These events served as a trigger for a martial political communication from the Minister of the Interior, Bruno Retailleau, describing “tipping point” the French situation regarding drug trafficking. A statement of urgency, boosted with new portmanteau words (“narco-scum”, «narco-enclaves»), then announcements, Friday November 8, aimed at updating the legal arsenal for fighting organized crime.
Was this fall week a tipping point alone? The statistical elements and analyzes of specialist investigators, in reality, outline the contours of a situation that has gradually become out of control over recent years. Criminal organizations are expanding their territorial influence as far as they exceed the limits of cruelty, in the context of a booming illicit market, driven by increased demand, particularly for stimulating products.
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“The significant deterioration of the situation is marked by violence linked to rapidly increasing trafficking and a very high availability of narcotics”analyzes Christian de Rocquigny, interim head of the Anti-Narcotics Office (Ofast). He underlines, echoing the notes from the specialized services, that “this deterioration occurred at the time when cocaine flooded the Atlantic coast en masse”with seizures of 5.6 tonnes in 2013, 17 tonnes in 2017, 26 tonnes in 2021, before a record figure expected for the year 2024.
It is therefore over more than ten years that the influence of drug trafficking has taken on an unprecedented scale, reinforced, in the post-Covid-19 period, by the development of means of distance selling and the rise of synthetic drugs. “In parallel with the influx of cocaine, which is bringing in record profits, new, more violent criminal methods have also arrived on our territory”continues Mr. de Rocquigny. A “toggle” progressive, already documented, which has found, in recent months, a particular acceleration as the protagonists of trafficking gain strength.
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