Bombay Durpun - Rare broad support in France for law to halt 'narco-state'

Conservative Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau will present the bill, with high-profile provisions to empower police and France's anti-drugs agency, in Marseille on Friday alongside Justice Minister Didier Migaud, a left-winger.

The Mediterranean port city is the epicentre of a nationwide organised crime boom that regularly erupts into ordinary citizens' lives in public acts of extreme violence.

"Either we all mobilise for this great years-long battle and win it, or there will be the mexicanisation" of France, Retailleau said last Friday after a multiple shooting in the western city of Poitiers.

"If we do nothing, we could become a narco-state", agreed senator Etienne Blanc, a co-author of the draft law from the conservative Republicans party.

For now, "France is not Mexico, but... there are a number of especially concerning signs" from street shootings to a trickle of corruption cases among public officials including customs officers and police, Blanc said.

Drug-related violence has spread beyond the biggest urban centres to regional towns and even rural areas, senators found in a report released in May.

In recent weeks, the shooting in Poitiers left one teenager dead and others wounded, while a five-year-old was hit in the head by two bullets during a car chase in Rennes in the northwest.

In May, a convict with deep connections to the drug trade was freed in a brazen ambush of a prison convoy by a heavily armed gang near Incarville in northern France in which two guards were gunned down.

Marseille alone had 49 drug-related killings, from gang members to random bystanders, in 2023, though the figure has fallen back to 17 in the city so far this year.

- 'See it every day' -

Money stokes the violence, with the Senate report estimating nationwide illegal drug revenues at a minimum of 3.5 billion euros ($3.75 billion) -- though Blanc believes the figure is more like six billion euros.

And while media and political attention focuses on street dealing spots often in poor neighbourhoods, much of the trade is "uberised", taking place online and out of sight thanks to encrypted messaging.

"There is a terrible lack of proportion between the resources of the traffickers and the French judiciary and police," said Roger Vicot, a Socialist MP specialising in security questions.

He constituency, in the northern city of Lille, "has become a kind of platform for all of France" in Europe's cross-border drug trade, sitting close to the Belgian border and a short drive from the Netherlands.

"The evolution of distribution methods, 'uberisation', the role of social networks, we see it every day," Vicot said.

Blanc's draft law would transform France's OFAST anti-drug-trafficking agency into what he calls an equivalent to the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) -- coordinating police, customs and intelligence services fighting the drug trade.

It would be flanked by a dedicated prosecution service along the model of existing bodies that pursue terrorism and financial crimes.

Further provisions include tightening money-laundering rules, seizure of criminals' assets, protections for undercover police and their informants, and anti-corruption measures for the civil service.

And certain forms of evidence obtained by technical means would be kept hidden from defendants in court to avoid tipping off criminal networks.

"If you hack a computer or a telephone, put a tracker on a car, and say how in the case files, of course the traffickers share that around and will take steps not to get caught next time," Blanc said.

Such black-box evidence rules already exist in Belgium and Italy, as well as for terror probes in France.

- 'Still time' -

Neither conservative Blanc nor Socialist Vicot, whose party belongs to the broader NFP leftist alliance, expect resistance to the law, which senators will debate from late January.

It would be a rare political consensus after parliament was divided into three deeply opposed blocs -- the left, the centre and the far-right National Rally (RN) -- after President Emmanuel Macron's gamble on new elections in June-July.

Lower-house lawmakers have been more occupied tearing Prime Minister Michel Barnier's draft 2025 budget to shreds in recent weeks than finding common ground.

Ministers disagree over France's broader drugs policy, such as whether to follow neighbouring countries like Germany in legalising cannabis or crack down harder on drug consumers.

France is a major cannabis consumer, with 22 percent of people aged 15-34 saying they had used it in the past year, according to 2022 data from the European Union Drugs Agency.

But when it comes to fighting criminal gangs, "everyone is aware of the state of the threat in this country... we're very behind and France is not prepared" to fight it, Vicot said.

"There's still time to react, but we have to do it right away".

G.Vaidya--BD