2023-06-25 22:57:13
Emmanuel Macron, the President of the Republic, announced that he had asked the Minister of the Interior “to prepare a decree for the end of the summer, so that the payment of fines (lump sum for drug consumption) can be immediate, by bank card or in cash”. In a daily interview Provence published on Sunday June 25, the Head of State considers “unacceptable” that with delayed payments by electronic payment only 35% of these fines are actually paid.
“We need to find ways to be more efficient”argues Mr. Macron, on the eve of his three-day trip to Marseille for Act II of the plan “Marseille in a big way” that he announced on September 1, 2021 to help a city plagued by poverty, housing problems and drug trafficking.
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Emmanuel Macron responded to journalists from the daily newspaper founded in Marseille. On this occasion, he was asked about the consequences of drug trafficking and consumers. “We cannot deplore drug trafficking if we have users”, he believes. As a result, “we have started to equip agents with 5,000 payment terminals”, he reported.
These resources are allocated to allow the measurement, by decree, of the immediate payment of fixed fines for drug consumption. ” People who have the means to use drugs because they find it recreational, they have to understand that they nurture networks and that they have a de facto complicity”, continued the Head of State to the regional daily.
Since September 2020 “ 350,000 fines have been drawn up”
“We have implemented a fixed fine of up to 2,500 euros (200 euros for a non-increased fine for a first drink). 350,000 have been trained in France since September 2020”recalled Mr. Macron. “But what we have found is that as payment is made by electronic payment between 45 and 60 days, we have a recovery rate of 35%. And it is below this average in Marseille. This is unacceptable “, he added.
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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 “delictual lump sum fines” for use have 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 Bouches-du-Rhône police headquarters.
The fixed fine is praised by some police officers and politicians as a “more effective response to the crime of drug use”which avoids “to clog up the courts”. But the French Observatory of Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) is more mixed. “The rise in power of this dynamic of financial penalization has been made to the detriment of measures with an individualized health dimension, which have become rare”he observed.
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In France, a 1970 law among the most repressive in Europe theoretically provides for punishing the illicit use of narcotics with a sentence of 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” as reminders of the law.
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