Just a few days ago, it was time to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The year opens under the sign of the Water Rabbit. In France, the political news of January suggests that the year 2023 will take place under other auspices: that of sea serpents. Of course, there are the endless debates on pension reform, an exercise in which ultimately few presidents escape. But it’s a completely different subject that has resurfaced in recent days: cannabis.
A recurring subject in the national debate, brought back to the table in 2021 during an information mission led by the National Assembly, it is now the turn of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council to issue a favorable opinion. to its “supervised legalization”. In a country where consumption is the highest in Europe and concerns more than 1 in 10 adults, the proposal is presented as a common sense measure. In reality, far from being the progress expected by its supporters, the project is basically neither more nor less than a surrender.
First, in the field of public health, it sounds a capitulation in good and due form. A setback that is all the more incomprehensible when, only a few days after the publication of the opinion, a study once again underlines the risks associated with the consumption of cannabis. Let’s be reassured, the defenders of the text want to make future cannabis distributors actors of prevention… How naive! But they show an even more worrying credulity in thinking that legalization will have the immediate effect of significantly reducing cannabis trafficking and will allow strict control over the composition of products. To believe that in a country where, let us remember, nearly 30% of cigarettes purchased come from smuggling, products that are not only cheaper but also more addictive and dangerous will not find their audience. Here again, good intentions have their limits: reality. In Canada, for example, despite the legalization passed in 2018, nearly half of consumption still comes today from the parallel market.
Cannabis legalization would add discredit to renunciation
Secondly, in the field of authority, progress is once again synonymous with retreat. While the report points to a phenomenon of cartelization by emphasizing that traffickers now assume in certain areas of the country “a social function […] instead of the usual public services and social actors”, the opinion denounces the “strong mobilization of the police and justice services which did not succeed in countering the scale of the traffic or the level of consumption” It would therefore be the turn of the representatives of the republican order and the authority of the State to abandon the neighborhoods plagued by trafficking.A decision certainly easier and less costly but so much more cowardly than that of occupying the field and to enforce the law.
By legalizing cannabis, what signal are we sending to those who experience this crime and the resulting insecurity on a daily basis, if not that of renunciation and abandonment? What signal are we sending to the traffickers if not to further increase their feeling of omnipotence after having succeeded in making the state back down? Finally, the legalization of cannabis would add discredit to renunciation. Discrediting the policy currently pursued by the Minister of the Interior who rightly promotes a policy of zero tolerance. Also discredits the work of local actors who mobilize on the ground and on a daily basis to deter but also to prevent the dangers of this scourge: elected officials, municipal police officers, associations, doctors, donors, teachers and parents. On the contrary, it is by speaking with one voice with a clear and unambiguous message that we can hope to obtain results in the fight against drugs.
Naivety of the approach, abandonment of the victims and discrediting of the actors who are leading the fight against drugs: legalization is indeed the wrong answer to a real problem. Smokescreen more than a miracle solution, it will dissipate no clouds: neither health risks nor insecurity. It will, on the other hand, send a very bad signal to dealers and to those who suffer them.