The payment of fixed fines for drug use must be “immediate, by credit card or in cash”, said Emmanuel Macron, in an interview with the daily La Provence published Sunday evening on the newspaper’s website, on the eve of a three-day visit to Marseille.
Considering it “unacceptable” that with the delayed regulations by telepayment only 35% of these fines are actually paid, the Head of State specifies that he has asked the Minister of the Interior “to prepare a decree for the end of the summer ” and that already “we have started to equip agents with 5,000 payment terminals”.
“We must find ways to be more efficient”, pleads Mr. Macron, on the eve of his three-day trip to the Marseille city for Act II of the “Marseille en grand” plan which he announced on the 1st. September 2021 to come and help a city plagued by poverty, housing problems and drug trafficking.
“We cannot deplore drug trafficking if we have users”, continues the Head of State to the regional daily: “People who have the means to consume drugs because they find it recreational, it they have to understand that they nurture networks and that they have a de facto complicity”.
“We have implemented a fixed fine of up to 2,500 euros (Editor’s note: 200 euros for a non-increased fine for a first consumption). 350,000 have been drawn up in France since September 2020”, continues Mr. Macron: “But what we have found is that as the payment is made by telepayment between 45 days and 60 days, we have a recovery rate of 35%. And this is below this average in Marseille. This is unacceptable “.
Experimented since July 16, 2020 in Marseille, this system of fixed fines targeting drug users was then extended to all of France in September 2020. In the Bouches-du-Rhône, 18,600 “criminal fixed fines” for use were drawn up for the year 2022 alone, an increase of 50% over 2021, the first year of full application of this system, according to the police headquarters of Bouches-du-Rhône.
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 up the courts”.
But the French Observatory of Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) is more mixed. “The rise in power of this dynamic of financial penalization has been made to the detriment of measures with an individualized health dimension, which have become rare”, he had thus observed.
In France, a 1970 law among the most repressive in Europe theoretically provides for punishing the illicit use of narcotics with a sentence 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 establishment of the fine, “alternative measures to prosecution” such as reminders of the law.
26/06/2023 04:17:16 – Marseille (AFP) © 2023 AFP
