"It wasn't me"; "It's not true"; "I had nothing to do with it"; "The police made a mistake"; "I just came to say hi to some friends"; "I wasn't there"; "I was playing football that day"... These were some of the denials heard on Thursday, August 3, before the 13th chamber of the Bobigny District Court. Every day, the small hands of the drug trade in Seine-Saint-Denis (northeastern suburbs of Paris) parade before the "chambre des stups" ("narco chamber"), as it is nicknamed, and are prosecuted according to the penal code for "illicit transport, possession, supply, transfer, acquisition or use of narcotics."
The peculiarity of the case which occupied the court until 2 a.m. on Friday morning, and in which six young people were on trial – including one who had just turned 18 – lay in the "unpleasant side of the case," as the presiding judge, Peimane Ghaleh Marzban, put it. Two of the defendants also had to answer for the more unusual qualifications of "involuntary injury" and "endangering the life of others."
According to the investigation, all were involved in one way or another in heroin trafficking in the Cité des Cosmonautes housing estate in Saint-Denis, and two of them were accused of selling the drugs themselves on May 16 and 17. Over the course of those two days, health authorities in the Hauts-de-Seine and Seine-Saint-Denis regions of greater Paris recorded an unusual series of serious ailments and non-fatal overdoses involving the product, for a total of 23 cases. On May 16, emergency services were forced to respond to seven overdoses in the space of just half an hour.
Analyses commissioned by the Île-de-France regional health agency established that the people taken into care had consumed heroin mixed with highly potent synthetic cannabinoids. What the victims had in common, all of whom were back on their feet within two days, was that they had all bought their product at the Cité des Cosmonautes.
None of them had filed a civil suit, as none of them had wanted to appear before a hearing to talk about their bad experience. It also soon became clear that nothing would be learned about the origins of the heroin, the cutting process that had made it even more dangerous, or even the simple mechanics of trafficking. All of which ended up frustrating the court to no end.
"Explain it to me! I want to know how it's done, selling heroin, how it works!" the court president asked Adel C., the only defendant to have admitted to selling the drug – difficult to do otherwise, as nine victims had recognized him on a photographic plate – but only once in his life, on May 16, and even then, without knowing what he was selling, he insisted.
You have 39.93% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.