Reims, Cambrai, Dijon, Angers, Nantes… These cities plagued by drugs
11:15 p.m., October 1, 2022, modified at 12:11 a.m., October 1, 2022
The corpse of an 18-year-old boy, shot in the head, was found partly charred Thursday morning in a park in Saint-Herblain, near Nantes (Loire-Atlantique). The investigation will have to confirm it but everything to suggest that the young man is a victim of the “war” which embraces the Nantes district of Dervallières against a backdrop of drug trafficking. The day before, Wednesday, a 17-year-old boy was machine-gunned there by two scooter shooters. a week, Nantes, where traders are connected Saturday afternoon against insecurity, make the headlines of the news channels continuously. Simple magnifying effect? The significance of drug trafficking, if it does not explain everything, weighs on the daily life of a city, praised not so long ago for its quality of life and today “gangrene” in the words of the prefect of Loire-Atlantique.
He could have used that of narco-banditry. This term has appeared in police jargon for ten years at the other end of France, in Marseille, to illustrate the rise in power of teams of criminals from the cities and enriched by millions of euros cleared by narcotics traffic.
But the city of Marseille and the suburbs of Paris and Lyon no longer have this prerogative. It has become a reality in all the major regional cities, such as Dijon, but also in more and more medium-sized cities. Four of them (Avignon, Reims, Besançon and Cambrai) even appear in the ranking of the 20 cities with the most deal points canceled by Ofast, the anti-narcotics office which leads the fight against drugs.
Read also – The director of the Anti-Narcotics Office: “nearly 1,000 actions per month” against deal points
The point of deal constitutes the most concrete materialization of the phenomenon. “For the consumer, it is the assurance of finding cam without an appointment in an area where the action of the police is hindered, summarize a commissioner in the region. For the trafficker, it is an income of several thousand euros per day on the condition of being supplied and defending his territory, hence the systematic presence of weapons”.
A principle now valid in the northern districts of Marseille as well as in Brive-la-Gaillarde, Le Creusot, Cavaillon, Valence, La Roche-sur-Yon, Poitiers, Angers, Limoges and Angoulême… When it was created in 2020, Ofast has recognized nearly 4,000 of these deal points (all departments are affected except Haute-Loire, Lozère and Gers) and has since carried out, in addition to its national and international investigations, a fierce fight to ” shelling”, designated as a national priority by the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, to destabilize them if not to dismantle them.
Undersized font
“What is disturbing, alert a policeman in the field, it’s that we are witnessing in these medium-sized towns what happened in Marseille twenty years ago with jambisations [des tirs dans les jambes]shootings and intimidation shootings…” If large cities have enough investigators to cope, the police forces in smaller towns are often undersized in the event of serious incidents or riots such as in Alençon (Orne) this week, where CRS had to be called in as reinforcements.
Read also – Cannabis, cocaine, heroin … The unpublished documents which retained the explosion of drug trafficking in Dijon
This Marseille-style drift, Besançon has had a painful experience of it for three years – 18 episodes of gunfire, eleven injured, one death – with the confrontation of two rival gangs for control of the ten or so deal points in the district of Planoise (20,000 inhabitants and an unemployment rate of 30%). Sentences of 3 to 10 years in prison were pronounced last June against some of the protagonists, some of whom were confused thanks to the dismantling of the Sky ECC encrypted messaging service taken by the cream of international traffic. These surveys also brought to light an emerging phenomenon, that of the employment of “little hands” from the Paris suburbs to “charcoalize” in Planoise via advertisements, promising 200 euros per day, published on Snapchat.
Overabundant supply
To the few voices that advocate the decriminalization of cannabis, the most widely used drug in France with nearly 900,000 daily users, the authorities retort that most of these deal points also offer the full range of available drugs. Cocaine has never been so present, as evidenced by the level of seizures (26.5 tonnes in 2021 against only 5 in 2010). Heroin is making a comeback, not to mention synthetic drugs. A company which represented, according to INSEE, nearly 21,000 FTE (full-time equivalent), for a turnover reflected at 4.2 billion euros in 2020.
Should we be surprised that the (overabundant) supply adapts to the demand (which is not weakening)? “Deal points are directly connected to local demand”, insists Stéphanie Cherbonnier, head of Ofast, to explain the multiplication of points of sale throughout the territory and thus cover all catchment areas. And for those who are reluctant to venture into sensitive cities to stock up on narcotics, traffickers have long invested in social networks to ensure home deliveries. Will “Ubershit” dethrone the deal point? For now, it has taken only a few market shares.