France looks to toughen war on drugs strategy amid trafficking surge

PARIS — Bruno Retailleau and Gérald Darmanin, France’s interior and justice ministers, have had no qualms in presenting France as a narcotic-infested dealers’ playground amid an uptick in illegal drug-related crime figures over the past few years.

Now they’re looking to put their money where their mouth is.

France’s lower house, the National Assembly, is this week debating a bipartisan, government-backed proposal aimed at, in the words of the legislation itself, “ending the drug dealing trap.”

The bill, which passed through the majority-conservative French Senate with unanimous support, contains provisions to offer law enforcement agents and justice officials more leverage to go after drug traffickers and their networks, including the creation of a dedicated prosecutor’s office like the one formed to investigate terrorists in the aftermath of the 2015 attacks.

But as Europe and much of the world experiments with harm-reduction policies and legalization in an effort to learn the lessons of America’s failed war on drugs, France is swinging in the opposite direction.

Both Darmanin and Retailleau want to crack down on drug users and dealers and have framed the issue as mostly a matter of law and order as opposed to one of public health. They’ve even gone as far as directly blaming users for the spike in violence.

In February, Retailleau borrowed Darmanin’s saying that “a joint has the taste of blood,” directly attributing the responsibility for trafficking-related murders to people who buy cannabis.

The current legislation has been lauded for the amount of resources it dedicates to dismantling organized crime. But it has also been criticized for containing shock measures that would fall into the war on drugs trap, such as expelling entire families from public housing if one member is convicted of a drug-related crime and ignoring the issue of treatment for addicts.

There is now a common understanding that “organized crime poses a strategic threat to France,” said Stéphane Quéré, a criminology professor at France’s National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts.

But the heart of the issue, Quéré warns, is one of funding, which legislation alone can’t entirely resolve.

“It’s relatively easy to go after small-scale street dealers or even mid-level traffickers. It’s obviously more complicated — so it takes more time, more investigators, more resources — to track down the people behind them.”

Spreading across France

Drug trafficking has been a long-standing issue in big French cities like Paris and Marseille, which has been trying to rein in drug-related violence for decades. But in recent years it has “spread to medium-sized towns, even small ones, and rural areas,” a bipartisan report released last year found.

The report estimated that the illegal drug trade generates at least €3.5 billion annually, evading detection and taxation — and that’s a “bottom range” estimate.

The report estimated that the illegal drug trade generates at least €3.5 billion annually, evading detection and taxation — and that’s a “bottom range” estimate. | Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images

With so much money at stake, gangs have increasingly resorted to violence. The French Interior Ministry announced in February that 110 people were killed in relation to drug trafficking in 2024 — out of a total of 980 homicides nationwide. Drug-related homicides peaked in 2023, with 139 dead and 413 injured.

Socialist Jérôme Durain and Étienne Blanc of the right-wing Les Républicains party, two senators who authored last year’s report on French drug consumption, focused their legislation on creating a centralized state prosecutor with broad authority to fight modern, complex trafficking syndicates.

Darmanin has also introduced a clause to create high-security prisons where only drug traffickers would be detained under particularly stringent conditions to avoid communication with the outside world.

The proposal is likely to face scrutiny in the National Assembly, where lawmakers have voiced concerns over certain proposals deemed threatening to defendants’ rights, like the nondisclosure of information regarding police investigation techniques to defense lawyers.

Some lawmakers have criticized Blanc and Durain’s decision to forego the contentious issue of prosecuting users.

“This bill says nothing about consumers, who should not be treated as delinquents but as people who suffer,” said Ludovic Mendes, a lawmaker from the pro-Macron Ensemble group.

Since 2021, France has opted for a model based on hitting drug users with a minimum fine that does not require prosecution in order to disincentivize consumption. In February, the Interior Ministry boasted that 288,000 people had been sanctioned for their consumption, a 10 percent year-on-year increase.

According to the French Observatory on Drugs and Addictive Behaviors, cannabis is the most popular illicit drug in France, followed by cocaine and ecstasy/MDMA.

While some French lawmakers have floated decriminalization and the legalization of cannabis — France is the European Union’s third-highest consumer of weed behind Czechia and Italy — they remain in the minority. The public itself remains divided, with 41 percent opposing legalization and 42 percent being in favor, according to a YouGov poll from November.