But the heart of the issue, Quéré warns, is one of funding, which legislation alone can’t entirely resolve.
“It’s relatively easy to go after small-scale street dealers or even mid-level traffickers. It’s obviously more complicated — so it takes more time, more investigators, more resources — to track down the people behind them.”
Spreading across France
Drug trafficking has been a long-standing issue in big French cities like Paris and Marseille, which has been trying to rein in drug-related violence for decades. But in recent years it has “spread to medium-sized towns, even small ones, and rural areas,” a bipartisan report released last year found.
The report estimated that the illegal drug trade generates at least €3.5 billion annually, evading detection and taxation — and that’s a “bottom range” estimate.
With so much money at stake, gangs have increasingly resorted to violence. The French Interior Ministry announced in February that 110 people were killed in relation to drug trafficking in 2024 — out of a total of 980 homicides nationwide. Drug-related homicides peaked in 2023, with 139 dead and 413 injured.
Socialist Jérôme Durain and Étienne Blanc of the right-wing Les Républicains party, two senators who authored last year’s report on French drug consumption, focused their legislation on creating a centralized state prosecutor with broad authority to fight modern, complex trafficking syndicates.