PAlmost 18 million of our fellow citizens have already used cannabis recreationally, according to a recent report by the National Assembly. While it’s forbidden, 1.5 million consume it regularly. Whether we like it or not, this is a social issue that the public authorities must take up. It is the responsibility of the legislator to provide answers to the legitimate concerns that exist, faced with a situation that escapes us.
In this context, we must get out of the lax trial regularly made to the proponents of an evolution of the legal framework. We, socialist senators, face reality: the situation is untenable. The French are ready to debate the consumption of so-called recreational cannabis.
We want to add our stone to the building, without bias and in the perspective of effective legislation. Indeed, we observe that the repression undertaken within the framework of prohibition is ineffective, inefficient and unjust. It does not protect our young people from the damage to their health caused by uncontrolled consumption. It maintains certain districts in a very strong dependence on trafficking which results in unbearable insecurity and violence for the inhabitants. It mobilizes substantial resources for a result that is ultimately almost nil.
Faced with this, two answers exist. The first, decriminalization, is characterized by a maintenance of the prohibition with a suppression of the penalties incurred. It would be a renunciation of the public authorities which would amputate themselves of the means to act. It would be a question of buying social peace with a certain cynicism. We refuse this demagogue and populist option.
Control the sanitary quality of products
We advocate the other way: legalization. Without minimizing the health impact of cannabis consumption, we believe, like existing public policies for tobacco and alcohol or even gambling, that legalization will provide the means to act more effectively to better protect our fellow citizens and especially our young people.
Indeed, legalization would make it possible to first control the sanitary quality of the products consumed. It would also serve to greatly curb traffic for the benefit of these disaster areas. Moreover, it would be possible to develop large-scale prevention plans, financed by the taxation of products and by the redeployment of the means of repression. Legalization must finally be a social shock to free the populations who suffer from the places of deal. We must equip ourselves with the means to reintegrate the little hands of trafficking into the legal economy. Eventually, new tax revenues should be drawn from the cannabis trade and from the savings made in the area of justice and the police. Significant resources could thus be mobilized both for prevention and for reintegration and economic development.
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