Four supermarket robberies in Périgueux and its agglomeration between August 22 and 27, 2022; 4,800 euros extorted with a handgun, a week of stalking and a suspect in his fifties addicted to crack who recognizes in police custody “having robbed to buy the cocaine he needs to make it”explains his lawyer, Mr.e Celia Borel. At the end of August, preoccupied by the repeated fires in the neighboring forest of La Double, to the west of the Dordogne, the inhabitants discovered with horror that their city of 30,000 inhabitants, “average” par excellence, are more sheltered from a phenomenon which they believed until then to be reserved for the large metropolises, Paris in the lead with its famous “crack hill”, in the 18e arrondissement.
In Périgueux too, “crack is fashionable”as one of the suspects of cocaine trafficking said, cited in an immediate appearance before the criminal court of the city, at the beginning of February 2023. Admittedly, there is still no “pebbles in circulation as we see in Paris”, would like to remind the public prosecutor, Solène Belaouar. But this does not prevent the development of crack. Failing to find “ready-to-eat”, Périgord users console themselves with “cocaine based”, according to the formula, a kind of homemade crack, cooked and smoked on site. The phenomenon is present in Périgueux and in other cities of the same size, such as Alençon, in Orne, or Lorient, in Morbihan.
A gram of cocaine crushed in a tablespoon, a dash of ammonia or baking soda, a stove: crack is tinkered with a minimum of material and smoked with water pipes that can be obtained at the local reception and support center for risk reduction for drug users (Caarud). By risk reduction, we mean preventing the risks of contamination of drug addicts with hepatitis B and C. Every Thursday, at the end of the afternoon, several dozen people hang around the foot of the truck equipped Caarud, in the car park of the administrative city of Périgueux, to provide “basic kits”, consisting of a clean pipe, two personal mouthpieces and a ready-to-use filter. In exchange for the kit, each recipient leaves a name, or rather a nickname. “We note the number of kits distributed for each, explains Chloé Ducret, specialist educator at the Périgord branch of the Committee for Study and Information on Drugs (CEID). Some take it for themselves, others take it for others. We can distribute about fifty kits per evening. »
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