After six months of investigation, 158 hearings held with investigators, magistrates, academics, journalists, representatives of the legal profession and social housing organizations; 8 on-site visits, notably to Marseille, Le Havre, and Antwerp, Belgium; and 19 written contributions from expert organizations, the report by the French Sénat committee on drug trafficking chaired by Socialist Senator Jérôme Durain published on Tuesday, May 14, marks an undeniable milestone. It recognizes a problem that today threatens the stability of France's institutions.
The report, completed between November 2023 and May 2024, is not without its faults. The health dimension, in particular, is deliberately omitted; and the recommendation of certain legal solutions is questionable. However, it provides an uncompromising overview of a phenomenon that has often been ignored by governments of all stripes for decades, who, instead of tackling it at its roots, have preferred to fight against what comes to the surface.
To begin with, the committee summed up the situation in one word: "submersion." "Drug trafficking is infiltrating everywhere, with the corollary of exacerbated violence," write the senators fatalistically, adding that "like an inexorably rising tide, drug trafficking always seems to find a way to infiltrate." Moreover, they say, its pervasiveness has resulted in a growing stranglehold on some of the most disadvantaged districts, exposing their inhabitants to an "unbearable daily life" punctuated by anti-social behavior, insecurity and the degradation of public facilities, punctuated by ultra-violent score-settling between rival gangs that sometimes results in "the murder of collateral victims."
Above all, the report reveals the real danger posed by the exponential growth of drug trafficking: The creation of a parallel social model with its own hierarchies, its own police force responsible for ensuring trafficking networks' security, its own "Taylorist" economy, with "task specialization and the creation of a parallel job market." In other words, a genuine counter-society whose effectiveness is guaranteed by the two powerful forces it employs on a daily basis: Not a social contract, but terror and financial power, which guarantee it the resigned or active support of neglected populations, who have been deprived of access to public services, isolated and abandoned to their fate.
Far from being confined to the outskirts of large cities, trafficking has also spread to "rural areas and medium-sized towns," where it has come to impose its own codes. Simultaneously serving as a base to fall back on, an area of commercial conquest and a place to store the merchandise that the networks sell, this "rear front" is no longer spared from a "particularly spectacular outbreak of violence," write the senators, as evidenced by the situation in towns that had long been untouched by drug gangs, such as Besançon or Le Creusot in eastern France.
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