“Cannabis, towards regulated legalization. The town hall of Bègles organized a round table open to all on Thursday evening to “develop a French model for the supervised legalization of the production, sale and consumption of cannabis”. At the end of January, the ecologist mayor of the town, Clément Rossignol-Puech, wrote to Emmanuel Macron to propose that his municipality become a “territory of experimentation for the cultivation, consumption and sale of recreational cannabis”, after the recommendations of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Cese).
In a January 24 opinion, this civil society advisory body called for “getting out of the status quo” and moving “towards supervised legalization”, noting that “from the point of view of public health, the actions of prevention carried out are generally ineffective, in particular with young consumers who are increasingly exposed to uncontrolled products”. The Europe Écologie-Les Verts mayor of Bègles, at the initiative of a forum in Le JDD on June 4, returns for Le Point to the reasons which led him to propose that his municipality experiment with the legalization of cannabis.
Le Point: How did you come up with the idea of offering an experiment in your municipality?
Clément Rossignol-Puech: This is after reading the report of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, released in January, which advocates supervised legalization. As mayor, I am confronted, like almost all mayors in France, with the management of drug trafficking in my municipality and the problems that this generates for the neighborhood. When a traffic is dismantled, it is reconstituted a few hundred meters further.
Do you think the answer lies in the legalization of cannabis?
To regulate, it is necessary to legalize and regulate. It’s counterintuitive, but that’s what we did for tobacco and alcohol and it works, it reduces the number of users. By continuing in the prohibitive model and increasing funding for repression, the number of consumers continues to increase, it is not supervised, there is no health monitoring and it feeds mafia networks. The national police are already very busy, the justice system is overwhelmed, the prisons are full, so I don’t think that’s the priority.
As mayor, I could not make a bill. The only thing that a local elected official can do is to act on his commune. So I worked on the subject and I am organizing a symposium this Thursday evening with national specialists on why to legalize in the first place, and how to experiment in a second time. This approach, Béglaises and Béglais understand it, even if some are worried about the risk of increasing consumption.
This is a very pertinent question to which I don’t quite have the answer yet. We are going to dig into the question and we will submit our proposals to the President of the Republic at the end of the year. I wrote to him and he replied. He took good note of my proposal for experimentation at municipal level and submitted the follow-up to this proposal to the regional prefect and the Minister of the Interior. It is therefore not a refusal.
When we have worked on the subject, I will make an appointment with the prefect and the Minister of the Interior, but also the Ministers of Agriculture and Health, to present this experiment which may take place in the town of Bègles, but also other municipalities. We will first build this experiment at the municipal level and then we will see over the course of the discussions if it will expand.
Aren’t you afraid that this experiment will create a breath of fresh air in the neighboring municipalities?
It’s not an experiment where we’re going to open coffee-shops to everyone. Bègles will not be the temple of cannabis consumption in France where people will come for a weekend to smoke joints. Of course, that’s not the plan at all. The project is to select a certain number of people who would volunteer to enter into an evaluation system, supervised, with a certain number of professionals.