The national illicit drug market has, for its part devoted to “supply”, extensive and constantly renewed quantified documentation. Seizures of cocaine hidden inside containers, ever-increasing catalogs of synthetic drugs delivered to homes, deal points touting their constant supply of quality cannabis: the massive distribution of narcotics was to induce a national demand to match the products. in circulation.
Data published Wednesday June 26 by the French Observatory of Drugs and Addictive Tendencies (OFDT) confirm this. They provide numerical evidence of booming consumption of the majority of illicit substances, driven by cocaine, amphetamines and even MDMA. “The main lesson is the continued exponential increase in the use of stimulants in the general population”summarizes Guillaume Airagnes, director of the OFDT.
The statistics from this study, called “Eropp” (“survey on representations, opinions and perceptions on psychotropic drugs”), are all the more useful since the previous figures dated from 2017. To remedy this obsolescence, the OFDT questioned a panel of unprecedented scale of 14,984 adults living in metropolitan France. For the vast majority of products, the results are on the rise, sometimes spectacularly. “In 2023, nearly one in ten adults (9.4%) have used cocaine at least once during their life compared to 5.6% in 2017, the largest increase in number of points (+ 3.8) measured among all illicit substances other than cannabis,” specifies the study.
“Hold the shock”
The flagship product of transatlantic drug trafficking, cocaine is also seeing its number of followers increase “current use” – that is to say at least once a year – from 1.6% in 2017 to 2.7% in 2023. If we refer to studies dating from 1992, the proportion of users of cocaine in France has thus increased tenfold. White powder shares this upward trend with other substances in the stimulant family, in particular MDMA, whose lifetime experimentation rate now stands at 8.2%, compared to 5% seven years later. early. But also amphetamines, at 4.3%, compared to 2.2% in 2017.
Generally speaking, the study highlights that 14.6% of adults aged 18 to 64 have already used an illicit drug other than cannabis at least once, a figure which has doubled since 2017. Current use increases by 70 % over the same period, going from 2.3% to 3.9%. Men are twice as likely as women to have already used this type of drug, whether during their lifetime (20.1% compared to 9.3%) or during the last twelve months (5.2% compared to 2.6%).
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