The photographs of the searches look like garden catalogs. We see potted plants with exuberant leaves, gilding under the halo of sodium lamps; sometimes, also, alignments of herbaceous plants in the ground, where the sun is quite generous. Such cases have multiplied in recent months on French territory – in town and in the countryside. Growers interrupted by police or gendarmerie raids share the same specialty: cannabis. Local production that continuously fuels sales of weed, consumed by a growing proportion of smokers.
The latest dismantling of such an illegal plantation takes place in the city center of Maubeuge (North). On December 6, 2022, at 6 a.m., the judicial police (PJ) burst into a commercial premises hijacked as a crop farm. After seven months of investigation, narrowing around a criminal group suspected of trafficking in Maubeuge as well as in the Lille metropolis, the agents of the PJ discover the loot: 2,000 plants of cannabis in full maturation. “A kilo of cannabis resin, a kilo of weed, 6,260 euros in cash and a 6.35 mm caliber handgun were also seized”, specifies the parquet floor of Lille. The five main suspects are indicted on charges including “production and manufacture of narcotics” and “criminal association”.
“Industrial” logics
Other recent seizures, on a smaller scale, have sometimes taken unexpected detours before reaching their goal. In Montgeron, in Essonne, it was a tenacious smell that put the police on the track, on October 12, 2022, before their sniffer dog took over and marked time in front of a cannabis culture thriving underground. of a building. In Lourdes (Hautes-Pyrénées), a few days earlier, the intervention following a violent fight in the middle of the street made it possible to locate in one of the duelists a room of cannabis cultivation containing 18 feet. In the summer of 2022, customs officers in Picardy spotted an 83-foot plantation, in Doullens (Somme), managed by a father, thanks to aerial views from Google Maps.
“The seizure of these narcotics proceeds from a particular cartography, with many operations in the North – in particular in indoor [« intérieur »] –, in the South-East and in New Aquitaine, emphasizes Christian de Rocquigny, Deputy Director of the Anti-Narcotics Office. People start from home and produce more than their personal consumption, then even more than for their circle of friends. They then enter into a logic of traffickers, in competition with criminal organizations, in particular already established local traffickers, who defend their territory, with the risks that this entails. »
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