THE FRENCH CONNECTION

'La Drogue Dans Tout Ses Etats' (Drugs in all their conditions)

by Bertand LeGendre

In France, as elsewhere in Europe, there is a growing concern with drugs (la drogue, stupéfiants) and drug misuse (toxicomanie). This concern centres on familiar issues such as increasing levels of drug misuse, drug-related crime, and the dissemination of HIV and AIDS (known in French by the acronym le SIDA). In the latter context, there has been experimentation both with making condoms (préservatifs) more widely available, including vending machines in the open street, while also encouraging the sale of injecting equipment through retail pharmacists and pilot syringe exchange schemes which have already claimed some measure of success (see Le Monde, 8 February 1989 and 23 June 1989). The worry has also rebounded within the French tourist industry, in that there have been a number of recent reports of people being pricked by needles buried in the sand at fashionable resorts such as Cannes. There are also familiar concerns (although much more widely expressed than in Britain, for example) about the problem of SIDA in the prison system. Taken together these familiar worries remind us that both drug misuse and the HIV virus are not troubled by language barriers. Another question which has very recently been raised concerns the legal status of drugs.

The following article is taken from a discussion by Bertrand Le Gendre, 'La Drogue Dans Tous Ses États', which appeared in Le Monde, 21 August 1989. It has been prompted by the publication of a book by Francis Caballero, Droit de la Drogue (Editions Dalloz, collection Précis Dalloz, 1989, 720 pages, t68 F). Caballero's thesis is essentially anti-prohibitionist, advocating a 'commerce passif' as the most effective system of drug regulation The article by Bertrand le Gendre gives a good impression of the universality and international character of drug problems and their encircling preoccupations.

When one thinks of departures from prohibitionist drug policies in Europe, it is customary to think only of the tolerance of licensed cannabis sales in the Netherlands. However, Spain has also introduced a version of decriminalisation. Moreover, a recent report by the Swiss Federal Commission, Apects de la Situation et de la Politique en Matière de Drogue en Suisse (Office Fédéral de la Santé Publique, Berne, June 1989) has recommended the de-penalisation of all possession offences. The French government for its part has indicated that it sees the decriminalisation of illicit drugs as a false solution, a position repeated by both M. Pierre Joxe, the Minister for the Interior, and Mme. Geneviève Domenache-Chiche, the new President of La Mission Inter-Ministerielle de Lutte Contre La Toxicomanie (Le Monde 1 5th November and 29th December 1989). Even so, Francis Caballero's The Law of Drugs is symptomatic of a changing mood in Europe which stands in opposition to the prohibitionist mentality which is associated, above all, with the USA.

Introduction by Geoffrey Pearson

In publishing The Law of Drugs, Dalloz have shown an unexpected boldness. That a publishing house with a rather stuffy catalogue - from the penal code to an austere treatise on civil procedure - has decided to show interest in an up-to-the-minute topic, is one thing, but that this book should go against accepted ideas is even more of a surprise.

The Précis Dalloz collection, on which generations of law students have worked themselves to death, is enriched by this manual by M. Francis Caballero, a professor at the University of Nanterre (Paris X) who has written a book which is both paradoxical and provocative. As university tradition requires, one can find in it all one needs to know about drug law, although this is blended in a thesis which smacks of heresy, according to which the widespread prohibition of drugs today has become something which cannot but end in a 'fiasco'.

The work distinguishes 'licit drugs' (tobacco, alcohol, tranquillisers..) from the 'illicit', those which one thinks of spontaneously when talking about drugs. Although nothing much on the face of it, this distinction nevertheless allows the suggestion that though no-one has ever died of an inoffensive 'fumette' of marijuana, each year nicotine addiction claims 2.5 million victims across the world and alcoholism 36,000 every year in France.

That is not, however, the essential thesis of M. Caballero. What he wishes to demonstrate is that, just as the prohibition of alcohol in the USA in the twenties did not achieve its goal, so the arsenal of legislation and policing deployed today against drugs has not been successful in holding back this scourge. Quite the opposite.

With the same causes producing the same effects', writes M. Caballero, 'we are witnessing a repeat of the American fiasco with ten times the power on a planetary scale: the "bath-tub" gin is replaced by adulterated heroin, the corruption of the local politician by that « the chief of state, the connivance of the judge by that of the supreme court, the fortune of the "bootlegger" by that of the international mafia...'

'This is because prohibition', he reckons, ' is the impartial ally of traffickers and the foremost source of finance for organised crime.' To give some idea of the perverse effects of this situation he adds, 'The banking system is contaminated by the re-cycling of drug money; the (budgetary) cost of the war against drugs increases incessantly; the police and customs are incapable of stopping more than 10 per cent of the drugs in circulation; the prisons fill to over-flowing, while the supply of drugs does nothing but grow.

'Above all', and it is a professor of law who is speaking, 'repression excites itself and becomes more and more detrimental to the liberties of the individual. The elementary rights of human dignity are held up to ridicule; unconstitutional laws are passed, particularly in France; liberties are threatened...' In brief 'drug

law poisons the atmosphere of the whole planet.'

It is true that, in the course of recent years, the concern to combat the devastations of drug misuse has moved the French authorities to allow adjustments to the penal code which, if applied for example to white collar crime would have provoked an outcry.

Now drug traffickers can be held for questioning for four days, twice that which is allowed for a murderer; magistrates' courts (tribunaux correctionnels) are empowered to sentence them to twenty years' imprisonment, even forty, although, in principle, only the assize courts (cours d'assises) are authorised to inflict such severe punishments; the supreme court of appeal (Cour de cassation) will allow a police offficer to pretend to be a buyer of heroin in order to 'nail' a pusher; searches by night are allowed by law although they are usually prohibited between nine o'clock in the evening and six in the morning.

Even so, M. Caballero is cautious with regard to legislation which is too tolerant. In Spain, for example, he writes that 'at the time of Franco the use of narcotics (stupéfiants) was not clearly suppressed.' In 1983, the possession of narcotics for personal use was legalise~ a mistake according to M. Caballero wl sees in the Spanish refusal to distinguish between use which is discreet or privat and use in public places...'a major error All the more so, since there is also a refusal to distinguish between the categories of products being used, whic amounts to placing cannabis and heroin on the same level.

So what can be done? M. Caballero makes himself out to be an ardent supporter of the theory of 'passive commerce', a system which would involve 'a genuine re-stabilisation of the law of drugs'. The regulations applicable to cannabis, for example, would be brought into line with those imposed on tobacco and alcohol, and would be strengthened. Whether they be licit or illicit, all drugs would be subject to 'a national monopoly of production, importation and distribution for each category' of products. All advertising or other forms of incitement to consumption of these products would be banished. In this way the perverse effects of prohibition touched upon above would be demolished. Such is the theory of 'passive commerce', 'a form of social control which endeavours to reconcile the liberty of the individual with the essential defence of society'.

Without claiming the argument for himself, M. Caballero also echoes another theory which would explain why some drugs with equally noxious effects are today the object of a bizarre tolerance (tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceutical products), whilst others are subject to an unrelenting prohibition (opium, coca, cannabis). Quite simply because the former are produced in afffluent countries, and the latter in poor countries... 'The law of drugs is seen as a law of the North versus the South, economically discriminatory, even racist...'

Not only does this book speak of all drugs as a plurality: conditions of production, regulations concerning advertising, taxation, foreign legislation, communal law...but it also offers an antidote to toxic ideas which, if one believes its author, pollute the debate on addictive drugs. Whatever one thinks of Caballero's stimulating arguments, stimulants are so few and far between that you should not deprive yourself of reading this one

Bertrand Le Gendre