In some French countryside, as in the Somme, heroin consumption is a scourge. The authorities are trying, not without difficulty, to stop this trafficking, which is destroying many lives.
It is a health crisis that is taking place quietly in certain French countryside. For more than 15 years, the authorities have been struggling to stem the phenomenon of heroin consumption in several departments located near Belgium, such as the Meuse and the Somme.
In the east of the Somme, there are things that seem unchanging in this little corner of the countryside. The yellow flowers of the rapeseed fields, the red bricks of the little houses. And recently, the pale faces of these puny silhouettes: young men especially, in search of their dose of heroin. A drug that is very easily found in Roisel, a town of 1500 inhabitants.
“Heroin, we always manage to get it”, says Benjamin, 33, who started heroin at age 17. He says : “Every day, if you want some, you come, there are some”. In a phone call, you can get heroin here at a derisory price: 15 € per gram, it’s four times less than in Paris. And it is even cheaper in Belgium, 2 hours by car from here, taking the A2, nicknamed “the drug highway”. “I’ve been there before when I had the license to take someonetestifies Benjamin. In return, I got what I wanted.”
In addition to this hard, inexpensive and easily accessible drug, there is social misery: in the region, one out of two young people is unemployed. This health crisis has been going on for years now and is destroying lives. “I separated from my spouse, it all messed up, even with my family, it’s still tense”, observes Benjamin, who “hope that 14-15 year olds won’t do the same bullshit”. RAlthough in this village of Roisel, the thirty-something knows at least fifty heroin users like him.
Few solutions to get out of addiction
Faced with this situation, users who wish to quit heroin in these rural settings have few options. In Roisel, to undergo long-term treatment, such as withdrawal treatment, drug addicts must go to Amiens or Saint-Quentin. But there is little public transport and many of them do not have permits. So there are a few addictology centers established in rural areas, but they are closing one after the other.
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This is Doctor Patrick Pommelet, from Csapa addiction center (Centre for Care, Support and Prevention in Addictology) of the city of Péronnewhich recovers some of the patients: “We find ourselves quite poor and quite alone here in Péronne. Attendance is increasing week by week. There are centers where doctors have retired and have not been replaced. There is also the problem of my fellow attending physicians who tend to avoid this kind of patient base”. CThis limited care offer is an obstacle to withdrawal, but it is not the only one. In these small towns and villages, all consumers know each other, pass each other on the street and tempt each other.
To stop, you have to cut yourself off from the world. Bastien is 47 years old, he is clean for almost 20 months, he “preserve“especially since he “just lost (his) dad, six months ago”. “I really want to consume to forget, to manage my emotions and my discomfort and therefore suddenly, I avoid going out to Péronne” he details. His only releases are now limited to “go for a couple of errands, go to the cemetery and volunteer at the Red Cross”. Bastien also intervenes in talk workshops with drug addicts in the region to show them, he says, that one day we can get off the hook.
“The applications and social networks that the dealers use are encrypted, so we cannot access these communications, etc… So it’s very hard to trace their network.”
Emilie Pistre, commander of the departmental gendarmerie of Abbevilleat franceinfo
The authorities, too, have difficulty curbing trafficking in the countryside. SOften, the gendarmes have to deal with micro networks, consumer-sellers who resell heroin on a very small scale. “Our objective is already to identify where drug trafficking can be organized” analyzes Emilie Pistre, the commander of the departmental gendarmerie of Abbeville, in the west of the Somme department. “Obviously, our rural area is less concentrated than an urban area, so it’s hard to understand the traffic, to know where the dealer can be, especially since the consumers are more dispersed”, she says. For Emilie Piste, “The difficulty with surveys is that often now, the youngest go through social networks or through applications such as Snapchat for example”. Consumers place orders via social networks and have them delivered to their homes, even in rural areas, this is a novelty in the department. Heroin seizures are on the increase, particularly because of this. In one year, in the Abbeville area, these seizures have even doubled.
