“After the Covid-19 crisis, we must legalize cannabis, quickly! ", Claim twenty elected officials of all stripes, including some LREM deputies, as well as doctors in a forum published on Thursday on the L'Obs website . This text follows a bill tabled last summer by the deputy François-Michel Lambert (Liberties and territories) and supported by some "walkers" like Caroline Janvier, alongside LFI or socialists.
The signatories, including the environmental senator Esther Benbassa or the deputies LREM Sonia Krimi and Joël Giraud, put forward "the economic argument" in the middle of the crisis. According to their calculations, legalization "would make it possible to return each year in the coffers of the State between 2 and 2.8 billion euros" and to create "between 30,000 and 80,000 jobs, especially in the agricultural sector". They also insist on the "security argument", in order to "relieve the police" of arrests for "simple use" of cannabis, and "the health argument" to "control the distribution and composition" of the product.
Fixed fine since Tuesday
François Pupponi (Liberties and Territories) declared that he was opposed to the legalization of cannabis. “With the coming economic crisis, people will need money even more. If tomorrow they cannot illegally sell cannabis, they will sell hard drugs, ”he warned. In January, a parliamentary mission was launched in order to "overcome the debate", recurrent in France, around cannabis.
As the leading European consumer, France had five million smokers of this substance in 2017, including 700,000 daily users, a number that has been increasing steadily for years. To finish with "de facto decriminalization", a fixed fine of 200 euros has been tested since Tuesday in some cities in France, before gradually affecting all of mainland France.
Hospital experiments
At the end of October, Emmanuel Macron had repeated not being in favor of "the legalization of cannabis or unregulated uses", because he "never saw robust studies showing that it had no effect on vigilance in especially of the youngest ”. Therapeutic cannabis, on the other hand, "has virtues in the context of treatments, in particular to support the treatment of pain," he said.
The deputies voted this fall in favor of its experimentation in several hospitals for a period of two years with 3,000 patients, in order to treat pain related for example to cancer or multiple sclerosis. Shaken by the health crisis, this experiment was postponed "at the latest" in January 2021.
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