Fixed fines for drug use could be paid immediately, “by bank card or in cash”, suggests Emmanuel Macron. The President of the Republic submitted this idea during an interview with the daily La Provence, published this Sunday, June 25. The head of state is due to go to Marseille from June 26 to 28.
Considering it “unacceptable” that with deferred payments 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”, argues Emmanuel Macron, on the eve of his three-day trip to Marseille for Act II of the “Marseille en grand” plan, which he announced on the 1st. September 2021, to 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 drink). 350,000 have been drawn up in France since September 2020”, continues Mr. Macron: “But what we have found is that, as payment is made by telepayment between 45 days and 60 days, we have a recovery rate by 35%. And it is below this average in Marseille. This is unacceptable. »
Experimented since July 16, 2020 in Marseille, this fixed fine system 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 been 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 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 of this dynamic of financial penalization has come at the expense of measures with an individualized health dimension, which have become rare,” he observed. In France, a 1970 law among the most repressive in Europe theoretically provides for the illicit use of narcotics to be punished by 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.
