Lat law for global security preserving freedoms, adopted by Parliament on April 15, will soon be examined by the Constitutional Council. It has already been widely discussed in the public sphere, but one of its provisions has received little attention. This is section 1er, paragraph 5, subparagraph 7, which fixes the framework of an experiment allowing the municipal police officers and the rural guards to note by report the offense of illicit use of narcotics. The offense, punishable by one year’s imprisonment and a fine of 3,750 euros, must, once established, be the subject of a written procedure sent to the mayor and the public prosecutor. But the illicit use of narcotics is also liable to be subject to a fixed tort fine. This device, recently introduced in the Public Health Code, makes it possible to put an end to public action before going before a magistrate in exchange for the payment of a sum of 200 euros (increased to 450 euros in the event of late payment) at the cost of registration in the criminal record.
The “comprehensive security” law does not specify whether municipal police officers are competent to implement this fixed fine in their mission of supporting judicial police officers. In the silence of the texts, we cannot exclude that this development is on the agenda. The hypothesis is all the more plausible given that the new power conferred on the municipal police is intended to be tested in urban areas where the use of narcotics is at the origin of mass litigation which encumbers the courts and rests. balance, most often, by a simple reminder of the law. However, it is precisely to reduce the resources devoted by the courts to the treatment of this “delinquency” and to reinforce repression that the device of the fixed tort fine was created.
Punitive treatment
The dangers posed to the rule of law by these progressive extensions of the power to punish drug users must be well understood. The repression of drug users was conceived by the authors of the 1970 law, which has set for fifty years the legal framework applicable in the matter, as a subsidiary measure to be implemented only with “extreme caution” only to offenders who cannot be “cured”. But over time, the sanction has become systematic. It is now the default response to illicit drug use. This punitive treatment of drug addiction signals the abandonment of the health ambition of the drug policy in France. This development is all the more regrettable as it undermines the fundamental principles of our legal order.
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