repro CL
“Everything is done to avoid paying, or as little as possible, these young people transformed into labor who are terrorized and who serve as cannon fodder. »
We come out KO. reading your work, groggy by the fate, the life, of these children already bludgeoned by life. In your eyes, if there was an emergency, a first lever to pull, what would it be?
Philippe Pujol. Mental health. Especially among the most vulnerable. When I speak of the most vulnerable, I certainly speak of the northern districts of Marseille, but of all HLM districts, peri-urban areas, and rural areas. Because the mental health problem is exploited by others. I’m talking about mental health in the broad sense. She was abandoned, her resources were taken away and for a number of years, these people have been victims of the exploitation of their mental health. In drug networks, we find people who are very young and have an imbalance, an appetite for violence. It’s a mental health problem. If this ground is abandoned, for lack of educators, psychologists, teachers, doctors, then this fault develops. If this first vulnerability is neither detected nor treated, it is then exploited by the networks. Especially if it is a taste for violence, a difficulty in communicating.
In the book, you advocate the decriminalization not of drugs, but of the user, like what is practiced in Portugal. For what ?
A drug network only works because there is a user. The recreational consumer, who does a joint from time to time or the executive who does a line of coke, is insignificant for a network. It’s pop culture. The reality, the true one, is that consumers are addicted and that for a network to work, you need a maximum number of addicted customers, who come back, who have needs. Cannabis is an easy substitute for anxiolytics. We all know people who smoke their joints daily and the reality is that they need it. The second cause is the quest for performance. And that’s coke. If we decriminalize the consumer, only him, we can at least have a socio-medical plan to help get him out of there. He can tell the occupational doctor that he has an addiction problem, he can talk about it, he can be treated.
You have been observing the daily life of the northern districts and networks for 12 years now and your “French Disconnection” investigation, which won the Albert-Londres prize. How have networks evolved since then?
“Paternalism” has disappeared. Before, networks treated employees well to keep business going. Then they reorganized, became uberized, archipelagoized. The real networks are all over the world: in Mexico, Morocco, Corsica, England. They are the ones who have the money and do corruption. In Marseille, we are not really concerned. Then come the semi-wholesalers, who handle transactions between one ton and 500 kilos. They sell to everyone, they don’t care. What they want is money. There is the ground and you have to turn it. The goal is that the competitor cannot grow and the employee cannot create his own territory. The last level is delegated to street youth. They are the ones who kill each other. They get into debt, deal, prostitute, do crazy things. It is the famous “Kalash dream”, the El Dorado conveyed by rap and Tiktok and which makes a multitude of young people dream who are placed in homes throughout France. They think they’re going to make money in Marseille. The reality is that they arrive, are put in the turbine, locked up and work in terror for gloomy lives. They live in terror, a debt is created for them. Their only hope is to be arrested by the police.
How can we explain the ultra-violence observed in recent years?
Before, settling scores was between bosses. Today, they are young people, against a backdrop of debt. Where is the easy money, where are the millions? If they existed, there would be stores everywhere. The reality is that everything is done to avoid paying, or as little as possible, these young people transformed into labor who are terrorized and who serve as cannon fodder.
What you describe, archipelago networks, is very far from the structuring of drug trafficking made by the Marseille prosecutor before the senatorial commission of inquiry?
Everyone thinks about their own interests. That of justice is to have more means. I completely understand his position. But, when I describe what I see, I have no interest, no request. I describe what is. In these networks that kill each other, there is no leader, no millions flowing freely. It’s extremely miserable. I therefore show a society, as a whole, which creates consumers and promotes the recruitment of young people by networks while abandoning the most vulnerable. To say anything else is to disempower society.
We can only be moved by the fate of Amal, beaten up, tortured, planted, injured, who at 16 years old has injuries that we would not wish on anyone. And by Leslie, 16 years old, who has been a prostitute for so many years…
Amal, he is handicapped in everything today. And he wasn’t disabled at birth. He has a physical, mental, social handicap, which was created over time. We can hope, in the long term, for a more or less pleasant life, with a pension. But we will never bring him back to a so-called normal life. He can’t even concentrate anymore. Leslie, she’ll be fine I think. But this little one is broken. She was a prostitute for several years, without even realizing it. So we are actually talking about rape. And if we do the calculations, we are talking about 200 to 400 rapes per year for six or seven years. These numbers are beyond belief. And we’re talking about a child. There are so many others.
Is there a Marseille specificity to the hell you describe?
There is no specificity to Marseille. Here, there is everything: vulnerable people, poverty, drugs, abandonment. A third of the population lives below the poverty line. What is happening here can happen in any city, any rural area, any suburb that combines these factors of poverty and vulnerability. It could be Toulouse, Nantes, Seine-Saint-Denis, the countryside. Wherever there are weak people to exploit, they end up being exploited. All this is made by what I call “The Monster”, the defects of our Republic, which generate three types of radicalism: delinquent radicalism, the one that I study the most, religious radicalization and political radicalization. »
“Cramés, the Monster’s Children”, by Philippe Pujol, at Julliard. €19.90.
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