This is the highest figure of all the departments, apart from the Parisian agglomeration.

In one year, more than 9,000 fixed fines for drug use (AFD) have been established in the Bouches-du-Rhône, the police headquarters told AFP.

In the amount of 200 euros, this fine erected as a symbol of the war on drugs and desired by the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, began to be experienced from July 16, 2020 in the Bouches-du-Rhône before 'be extended to the whole of France in September.

"Without consumers, there is no traffic"

"The agents of the departmental direction of public security (police) drew up 7,316 fixed tort fines, those of the departmental gendarmerie group 1.595 and the border police services 214", told AFP the prefecture of Bouches- du-Rhône, department where Marseille is located, the second largest city in France.

"The department is in the first position (outside the Paris police prefecture) in terms of the number of AFDs drawn up, in the police zone and in the gendarmerie zone, compared to other departments in France," she added.

“Without consumers, there is no traffic.

In addition to the strategy of shelling points of deal and judicial work to dismantle the networks, AFD is providing an immediate response to sanction consumers, ”underlined the Prefect of Police Frédérique Camilleri.

900,000 daily smokers in France

"Policemen and gendarmes of Bouches-du-Rhône have very well appropriated this simple tool and use it very frequently, as well in the Marseilles cities as during road checks or patrols of public way", she added. .

Many districts of Marseille are plagued by criminality linked to drug trafficking, cannabis in particular.

This crime has spread to a few other towns in this south-eastern department located on the axis of many trafficking between Spain and Italy.

The French are the leading consumers of cannabis in Europe with five million annual users, including 900,000 daily smokers.

The fixed fine is praised by some police officers and politicians as a "more effective response to the offense of drug use", which avoids "clogging the courts".

A mixed record

But the French Observatory for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) is more mixed.

"The rise of this dynamic of financial penalization has come at the expense of individualized health measures, which have become rare," observed the OFDT in its balance sheet at the end of April.

In France, a law of 1970, among the most repressive in Europe, theoretically provides for punishing the illicit use of narcotics with a penalty of up to one year in prison and a fine of 3,750 euros.

But imprisonment for use remains exceptional, the magistrates favoring, before the introduction of the fine, "alternative measures to prosecution" such as reminders of the law.

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