VIDEO – Drug trafficking: Briançon, a small town plagued by the scourge

There is a constant back and forth between cannabis sellers, lookouts and customers, which can be seen in the report at the top of this article. We are in a small HLM city of Briançon and here, in these images, a point of sale, known throughout the department. Half an hour later, when the police patrols arrived, everyone disappeared: “They squat part of this building”, one of them declares to our camera, revealing the location.

The police come here several times a week. They know every cache in the room. That evening, the traffickers were faster and left nothing behind. We will have to come back. Several of these police officers worked in large cities before. When taking up their post here, in a town of 11,000 inhabitants, they did not expect to find such a network of traffickers: “It’s not a big city, but there are a lot of requests as it runs 7 days a week”, notes one of them.

At the foot of the ski slopes, Briançon is better known for its fort Vauban than for its dealer. However, for the past four years, his small police station has been facing more and more traffic. The scale of the seizures for ten months speak for itself: in one take, the police were able to find cannabis resin, sometimes up to two kilos at a single receiver, or even 650 euros seized from a dealer. That is “half a day’s work”, assures one of them, solicited in our subject.

“Drug trafficking is a national phenomenon, even in our most remote countryside in France. Briançon is not immune to this phenomenon”, he continues. “As long as the traffic is juicy, it will remain very difficult to contain”. The daily life of the inhabitants has changed. At the end of December 2020, a shooting broke out in the Toulouzannes district, considered one of the drug hubs in the Hautes-Alpes. Thus, according to the town hall, even small towns require reinforcements in the face of this phenomenon. For the time being, Briançon has around forty police officers to secure the whole city.