They are stepping up to the plate to remind us of the urgency to act on such a subject. A collective of around fifty elected officials, including Martine Aubry (PS), Christian Estrosi (Horizons) and Benoît Payan (DVG), calls for “a national and European plan” against drug trafficking, in an article published Thursday in The world.
“There is not a month during which the news is not punctuated by news items against a backdrop of drug trafficking,” underlined the elected officials, gathered within the Urban France association. “This scourge is no longer specific to certain large cities,” they wrote, indicating that “more than seventy victims linked to drug trafficking have already been recorded by the Ministry of the Interior since the beginning of 2023.”
Five Steps to Tackle Trafficking
Elected officials propose five measures to combat drug trafficking, for “national and local plans (…) more concrete and more effective”. They thus call for “launching a real national and European plan”, “generalizing heritage investigations and fully tackling the wallets of traffickers”, but also “further supporting communities and generalizing experiments”.
The collective is also asking for more resources and wishes to “further territorialize the means of justice according to demographic pressure and the number of crimes observed”. They finally launch a call for “a lasting public health policy” which would “reduce demand”. “We must not choose between prevention, education and firmness,” they said.
“For many months, we have been warning about the slowness of investigations, the lack of resources and the seriousness of the situation,” justify the elected officials, declaring however that the “government announcements and the increase in budgets allocated to internal security and to justice are going in the right direction.”