A veritable white tsunami: cocaine consumption is exploding in France, where one in ten adults have already taken it at least once in their life, shows a study by the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Tendencies (OFDT) published on Wednesday. For comparison, in 2017, they were only 5.6%.
“Cocaine is becoming more and more available. The supply has increased significantly, with record seizures, in a context of considerably increasing production, a price which is stagnating – between 60 and 70 euros per gram – while purity increases,” recalls Guillaume Airagnes, director of the OFDT .
A democratization of use
In 2022, 27.7 tonnes of white powder were intercepted in France, according to the latest report from the authorities, a figure multiplied by five in ten years. “We can add to this the democratization of use with a greater variety of types of consumption: festive, but also in professions where the arduousness is high,” explains Guillaume Airagnes.
Current use (at least once in the last 12 months) is experiencing an exponential trajectory: consumption has increased tenfold between 1992 (0.3%) and 2023 (2.7%).