2023-06-27 04:30:04
A police officer from the specialized field brigade unit (BST 14) checks a person, in Marseille, on March 31, 2023. CHRISTOPHE SIMON / AFP
From the Colombian jungle to the emergency departments of French hospitals, the most recent indicators of cocaine trafficking and consumption tell “a booming market”, as the title of the latest study by the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Tendencies (OFDT) on the subject, published at the end of March. There “Diffusion dynamics have accelerated in twenty years”underlines this report, which looks at France with the magnifying glass.
See also: How does cocaine get into consumers’ pockets?
The current market is primarily characterized by a supply that has never been so strong. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 1,982 tonnes of cocaine were produced worldwide in 2020, compared to 1,134 tonnes in 2010. Consumption in Europe is expanding rapidly, notes the OFDT, with approximately 3.5 million regular users, including 600,000 (compared to 400,000 in 2010) in France, one of the countries most affected.
Seizures have never been so high. After an average of 11 tonnes per year in the years 2010-2020, they reached a record level of 27.7 tonnes in 2022. “change of scale” which is reflected in the accessibility of the product for consumers. “There is an abundance of supply, marked by a purity of the product never seen before – 72% of active ingredients on average in 2022 –, for a low price, between 50 and 70 euros per gram”, analyzes Ivana Obradovic, deputy director of the OFDT. That is a rate four times lower than in 1990, even taking inflation into account.
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“Cocaine presents one of the most diversified traffics, with the use of home delivery and digital tools, poursuit Mme Obradovic. We also now notice the use of splitting logics, making it possible to sell doses at 10 euros for example. » This democratization of consumption is driven by increasingly popular seller accounts on social networks. They praise the quality of their merchandise, put forward promotional and loyalty offers according to marketing strategies worthy of mass distribution.
“The sales force methods observed in the legal trade now apply to the resale of cocaine, in the continuity of the observations already made for cannabis”, emphasizes the OFDT study.
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This accessibility concerns the entire French territory, and a wide public, from all economic and social backgrounds. Pending the 2023 survey on consumption in the general population, which is currently being carried out, the latest statistics available date from 2017. According to these data, the majority of the 2.1 million cocaine users identified consume “on an experimental basis”. Regular users (at least once a year) are both socially integrated people who consider “to control” their use and more “intensive”, more marginalized consumers.
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