In France, Drug Traffic Spreads to New Territory: Small Towns

For centuries in Morlaix, a city of cobblestones and creperies on the Breton coast of France, the best-known dealers were the ones who traded in linen during the Renaissance and built a number of unique half-timbered houses in the middle of town.

The new dealers are another story.

France, long a major European market for illicit drugs, is experiencing a new eruption of concern over its domestic drug trade, and the violence that often accompanies it. In the past few years, experts say, the trade in illicit drugs has become more noticeable in France’s small and medium-size cities, bringing a measure of insecurity to places that had once felt sleepy and safe. Morlaix, with its population of about 15,000, is among them.

“We are confronting a tide of cocaine — a new thing,” said Jean-Paul Vermot, the mayor.

On a recent morning, Mr. Vermot gave a tour of Morlaix, pointing with pride to its quaint marina, the City Hall balcony where Gen. Charles de Gaulle delivered a speech in July 1945 and the 18th-century tobacco factory that has been transformed into a cultural center.

He also showed the park bench where, he said, a group of young dealers three years ago threatened to kill him and burn down his house. He showed a public housing complex where he said drug deals were recently made in the open before a police crackdown. He showed a door of a residence still riddled with bullet holes, a recent effort by a group of young dealers to intimidate another young man in debt to them.

Faced with what has been called the “simultaneous explosion” of supply and demand for illegal drugs, French officials nationwide are embracing proposals to crack down on traffickers. Conservative politicians have taken to blaming casual consumers, including marijuana smokers, for supporting a deadly industry at a time when some governments in the Americas and Europe have decriminalized or legalized cannabis.

Whether it all amounts to a new French war on drugs remains to be seen, given the country’s bout of political instability. France’s center-right national government collapsed last month after bitter disagreements over the 2025 budget. A new government, of a roughly similar political bent, was announced just before Christmas.

Its interior minister, Bruno Retailleau, is a holdover from the previous one and a tough-talking architect of the proposed antidrug plan. Its justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, recently said he wanted to put the 100 biggest drug dealers who are currently incarcerated in solitary confinement, “as one does with the terrorists.”

It is clear that any future conversation about drug policy will not be limited to the traditional hot spots in the suburbs of Paris or in Marseille, France’s second-largest city and a legendary bastion of organized crime.

Now, more than ever, the talk is of drugs in “La France profonde,” or “deep France,” those slower-paced places where some essential part of the nation’s soul is believed to reside. In May, a French Senate report found that “the intensification of trafficking in the rural areas and the moderate-sized cities” had been “accompanied by an outbreak of violence particularly spectacular and worrying, sometimes making citizens experience veritable war scenes.”

Mr. Retailleau has said that French drug trafficking has the country on the verge of “Mexicanization,” a phrase that appears to imply a loss of government control over public safety, the corruption of public officials and the increasing prominence of drug gangs in public life. Some experts consider the language to be exaggerated. But many acknowledge that a number of harrowing episodes far beyond the big cities are a new cause for concern.

In October, a 5-year-old child was shot twice in Pacé, a small town near Rennes, during a drug-related car chase. In November, a 15-year-old boy was shot in the head during a drug-gang shootout in Poitiers, a city of 90,000 people in the center-west of France.

Le Parisien newspaper reported last month that five people had been identified as suspects in an armed kidnapping of a 77-year-old woman in June in Trévoux, a town of 7,000 people north of Lyon, as part a drug-related extortion scheme targeting her son.

All of these episodes have been dwarfed by the recent trouble in Marseille, the old Mediterranean port gripped of late by gangland turf battles that have claimed scores of lives in the past three years, and have seen the rise of a generation of teenage contract killers.

In November in Marseille, Mr. Retailleau and the justice minister at the time, Didier Migaud, who leans left, laid out plans to fight the drug war. Among them was a proposal for a national prosecutors’ office and special courts dedicated to organized crime; additional police officers; and the appointment of a new “liaison magistrate” in Bogotá, Colombia.

But in a visit to Rennes after the shooting of the 5-year-old, Mr. Retailleau also laid some of the blame on users: “You who smoke joints, who take rails of coke,” he said, “it has the taste of tears and, above all, of blood.”

A wide range of illicit drugs is available in France, but cannabis and cocaine dominate. Lawmakers find the latter particularly troublesome.

In France, and in Europe generally, cocaine trafficking began to take off in the late 1980s, when the drug market in the United States became saturated, and U.S. officials began cracking down more severely on cocaine. A European Union Drugs Agency report from last year noted that European seizures of cocaine now exceeded those made by the United States.

Jérôme Durain, a French senator who is an author of the Senate report and president of a Senate investigative commission on narcotics trafficking, said the spread of the drug trade to smaller towns was the inevitable result of big-city gangs seeking to expand into new markets. Technology has helped, he said, with the rise of “Uberization,” which allows people in the countryside to order drugs with cellphones.

“It’s like how 30 years ago, when I was young, there were McDonald’s in Paris,” Mr. Durain said in an interview. “Now you have them everywhere.”

Mr. Vermot, the mayor of Morlaix, said harder drugs had become more prevalent there. Recent police surveillance of a known dealing site, he said, identified users from all walks of life. “Heads of businesses, workers, functionaries, artisans and people living on the margins — we truly had the whole range of society who came to buy, with this new phenomenon of the presence of cocaine,” he said.

Mr. Vermot noted that Morlaix’s public housing was well cared for and well integrated into neighborhoods with wealthier residents. This is not the case in some of France’s biggest cities, where poor people clustered in the banlieues, or suburbs, can feel cut off from the center of town and the economic mainstream.

In a close-knit city, he said, this also means that he is quick to hear complaints from neighbors.

“Living together actually allows us to mitigate, to lessen, to avoid a certain number of social problems,” he said, including when young dealers start trouble.

Morlaix is far from a city paralyzed by crime. In a country that strictly limits access to guns, its problems can seem almost quaint by American standards. Its residents are aware of the problem, but not everyone supports a crackdown.

Aurélien Cariou, 48, a night watchman, said he suspected that the proposed drug policies were an expression of prejudice against racial minorities, who tend to live in France’s poorer neighborhoods. Getting tough on cannabis, in particular, he said, seemed like an excuse “to knock the heads of Moroccans and Algerians.”

Daniel Ricoul, 55, the owner of a cosmetics store in the town center, said the government needed to address delinquency with a heavier hand. “It’s necessary to be firm,” he said.

Mr. Durain, the senator, is, like the mayor, a member of the Socialist Party. He said he had spoken to a number of left-leaning mayors around the country who agree with many of the proposed changes to the system because they know there is a problem. If there is buy-in for the proposals from the left and the right, it could give a pending drug-fighting bill legs in a badly polarized legislature that cannot seem to agree on much else.

Mr. Vermot, the mayor, said that some of the city’s problems had subsided with a recent wave of arrests. But he knows he is in for a long-term struggle. He said he liked some of the ideas that would give law enforcement more tools to go after dealers and traffickers. But he is worried that conservatives seeking to rein in France’s ballooning debt will cut social programs that serve to keep drug-world trouble in check.

Still, he said: “We have to be honest. It’s a problem. And we have to continue to confront it.”

Ségolène Le Stradic contributed reporting from Paris.