A slightly offbeat ceremony is scheduled for Saturday March 26, on the edge of the 19e arrondissements of Paris, Aubervilliers and Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis), in the presence of the three mayors concerned: the inauguration of the “La Défonce district”. A plaque will be unveiled by a participant, renamed in “Minister of the Underground Economy”. His speech is already almost written: “In this district undergoing urban revitalization, you will find everything: crack, but also contraband cigarettes, ecstasy, various tablets… »
The local residents gathered in the collective 93 Anti-Crack sum up the objective: “The state is laughing at us, so we are going to laugh at it. Maybe this will finally get him moving…” A way to mark the half-anniversary of the camp for drug addicts set up here. “A month, rather: a musty birthday”, corrects a neighbor.
On September 24, 2021, the police had transferred to a small public garden stuck on the edge of the ring road, Porte de la Villette, the 100 or 200 crack users who previously wandered rue Riquet and around the Jardins d’Eole, in another part of the borough. It was a question of reducing the pressure in a district, even if it meant that it rose a little further. Gérald Darmanin had been very clear: it is “a solution that can only be temporary, that can only last a few hours or a few days”had promised the Minister of the Interior, on September 28, 2021, before the deputies.
“No one answers our emails”
Six months later, the addicts to this drug of the poor are still there and the residents are in despair. To the daily difficulties caused by the forced cohabitation with drug addicts in great precariousness is added in these very working-class neighborhoods the feeling of being despised, abandoned. “We’re just little people, Arabs, Blacks, shit, what, gets angry Dominique Gamard, one of the leaders of the collective. So we are forgotten, no one answers our letters. We are at our eleventh event in six months and nothing is happening. »
In January, the Prefecture of Police tried to move the “crack supermarket” again, this time to a railway wasteland at 12e arrondissement. But the joint opposition of elected officials from the left, right and La République en Marche killed the project in the bud. “Obviously, over there, they are white, bourgeois, so we hear them…”, breathes Dominique Gamard. At the end of this episode, the prefect of police, Didier Lallement, warned the inhabitants of the North-East of Paris: they “must now expect a long occupation of the public space of the square”. He was telling the truth.
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