For centuries, in Morlaix, a city of cobblestones and pancake houses on the Breton coast of France, the most famous merchants were those who traded in linen during the Renaissance and built a series of unique wooden houses in the middle of the city.
New dealers are a different story.
France, long Europe’s main market for illicit drugs, is experiencing a new eruption of concern over the domestic drug trade and the violence that often accompanies it. In recent years, experts say, the illicit drug trade has become more visible in France’s small and medium-sized cities, bringing a measure of insecurity to places that were once sleepy and safe. Among them is Morlaix with its approximately 15,000 inhabitants.
“We are facing a tide of cocaine – which is a new thing,” said Jean-Paul Vermot, the mayor.
One recent morning Mr. Vermot toured Morlaix, proudly pointing to its unusual marina, the balcony of the town hall where General Charles de Gaulle gave a speech July 1945 and a tobacco factory from the 18th century that was turned into a cultural center.
He also showed the bench in the park where, as he says, three years ago a group of young dealers threatened to kill him and burn down his house. He pointed to a public housing complex where, he said, drug deals had recently taken place in the open before the police action. He pointed to the door of a house still riddled with bullet holes, a recent attempt by a group of young dealers to intimidate another young man who owed them money.
Faced with what was invited “simultaneous explosion” of supply and demand for illegal drugs, French officials across the country are embracing proposals to crack down on smugglers. Conservative politicians have begun to blame ordinary consumers, including marijuana smokers, for supporting the deadly industry at a time when some governments in America and Europe decriminalized or legalized cannabis.
Whether all this will mean a new French war on drugs remains to be seen, given the country’s political instability. Center-right French citizen the government has fallen last month after sharp disagreements over the budget for 2025. The new government, roughly of similar political orientation, was announced just before Christmas.
Her interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, is a legacy from the previous one and a stubborn architect of the proposed anti-drug plan. His Minister of Justice, Gérald Darmanin, recently said he wanted to put the 100 largest drug dealers who are currently imprisoned in solitary confinement, “as is done with terrorists”.
It is clear that any future conversation about drug policy will not be limited to the traditional hot spots in the suburbs of Paris or in Marseille, France’s second largest city and legendary bastion organized crime.
Now, more than ever, there is talk of drugs in “La France profonde,” or “deep France,” those slower places where some essential part of the nation’s soul is believed to reside. In May, report of the French Senate found that “the intensification of human trafficking in rural areas and cities of moderate size” was “accompanied by outbreaks of violence particularly spectacular and worrying, due to which citizens sometimes experienced real scenes of war”.
Mr. Retailleau said the French drug trade was a country on the brink of “Mexicanization,” a phrase that seems to imply a loss of government control over public safety, corruption of public officials and the increasing importance of drug gangs in public life. Some experts consider the language be exaggerated. But many admit that the numerous harrowing episodes far outside the big cities are a new cause for concern.
The child is 5 years old in October shot twice in Pacé, a town near Rennes, during a drug-related car chase. In November, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the head during a crackdown on drug gangs in Poitiers, a city of 90,000 people in central-western France.
The newspaper Le Parisien reported last month that five people had been identified as suspects in the armed kidnapping The 77-year-old woman in June in Trévoux, a town of 7,000 people north of Lyon, as part of a drug-related extortion scheme targeting her son.
All these episodes are overshadowed by the recent problems in Marseille, an old Mediterranean port recently engulfed in gangster fights that have claimed dozens of lives in the last three years, and have seen rise generations of teenage contract killers.
In November in Marseille, Mr. Retailleau and then-justice minister Didier Migaud, who leans to the left, outlined plans to fight the war on drugs. These included a proposal for a national prosecutor’s office and special courts dedicated to organized crime; additional police officers; and the appointment of a new “liaison magistrate” in Bogotá, Colombia.
But on a visit to Rennes after the shooting of the five-year-old, Mr. Retailleau also passed part of the blame on users: “You who smoke a joint, who take cocaine,” he said, “it tastes like tears and, above all, blood.”
A wide range of illicit drugs is available in France, but cannabis and cocaine dominate. The representatives consider the latter particularly problematic.
In France, and in Europe in general, the cocaine trade started to take off in the late 1980s, when the drug market in the United States became saturated and American officials began cracking down on cocaine. AND Report of the European Medicines Agency from last year noted that Europe’s cocaine seizures have now surpassed those in the United States.
Jérôme Durain, a French senator who is the author of the Senate report and the chairman of the Senate investigative committee on drug trafficking, said that the spread of drug trafficking to smaller cities is an inevitable consequence of gangs from big cities looking to expand into new markets. Technology has helped, he said, with the rise of “Uberization,” which allows rural people to order drugs with cell phones.
“It’s like 30 years ago, when I was young, there was a McDonald’s in Paris,” Mr. Durain said in an interview. “Now you have them everywhere.”
Mr Vermot, the mayor of Morlaix, said harder drugs had become more prevalent there. A recent police sweep of a well-known trading post, he said, identified users from all walks of life. “Business leaders, workers, officials, artisans and people living on the margins – we really had a whole range of society coming to buy, with this new phenomenon of the presence of cocaine,” he said.
Mr Vermot noted that public housing in Morlaix was well looked after and well integrated into neighborhoods with more affluent residents. This is not the case in some of the largest French cities, where poor people have gathered in banlieues or suburbs, can feel cut off from the city center and economic centers.
In a tight-knit city, he said, that also means he’s quick to hear neighbors’ complaints.
“Living together actually allows us to mitigate, reduce, avoid a number of social problems,” he said, including when young traders start problems.
Morlaix is far from a city paralyzed by crime. In a country that severely restricts access to guns, its problems may seem almost outlandish by American standards. Its residents are aware of the problem, but not all support the crackdown.
Aurélien Cariou, 48, a night watchman, said he suspected the proposed drug policies were an expression of prejudice against racial minorities, who live in poorer neighborhoods in France. He said the crackdown on cannabis in particular seemed like an excuse “to smash the heads of Moroccans and Algerians”.
Daniel Ricoul, 55, owner of a cosmetics shop in the city centre, said the government needed to get a firmer grip on delinquency. “You have to be tough,” he said.
Mr. Durain, the senator, is, like the mayor, a member of the Socialist Party. He said he has spoken with a number of left-leaning mayors across the country who agree with many of the proposed changes to the system because they know there is a problem. If there is acceptance of the proposal from the left and the right, it could deliver a pending anti-drug bill in a badly polarized legislature that can’t agree on much else.
Mr. Vermot, the mayor, said some of the city’s problems had eased with the recent spate of arrests. But he knows he has a long fight ahead of him. He said he likes some of the ideas that would give police more tools to hunt down dealers and traffickers. But he is worried that the conservatives are trying to rein in France growing debt they will cut social programs that serve to keep the problems in the drug world under control.
However, he said: “We have to be honest. That’s the problem. And we have to continue to face it.”
Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.
