On Sunday June 4, some sixty personalities, elected representatives from different political backgrounds and associations, signed an article published in the Journal du Dimanche calling for the right to experiment locally with a controlled legalization model for the production, sale and consumption of recreational cannabis. Last February, the mayor of Bègles, Clément Rossignol Puech, wrote to the President of the Republic asking for the town he administers to be a pilot for a legalization trial, making the Girondine city the ideal candidate for such an initiative.
According to the signatories of the article published in the June 4 issue of Le Journal du Dimanche, controlled legalization would make it possible to control the quality of the products sold, stop fuelling parallel economies, relieve congestion in prisons and courts, and reduce consumption and crime.
For the sixty or so signatories of this tribune, published in the Journal du Dimanche, including Eric Correira, a nurse and President of the Greater Guéret agglomeration community in the Creuse, it’s a question of“putting people at the heart of our concerns”. As such, “legalizing cannabis appears to be the only relevant, objective and rational option for France“. With the number of daily cannabis users in France estimated at nearly 4 million, legalizing cannabis is an obvious choice for Mr. Correira.
Although no elected representative from the Creuse region has yet volunteered to run a local cannabis legalization experiment, the town of Bègle announced last February that it wanted to make the Gironde city a pilot town for an end to adult-use cannabis prohibition.
In a letter made public on Friday February 3, the mayor of Bègles, had in fact announced a“Proposal to make Bègles a national experimental territory for the cultivation, sale and consumption of recreational cannabis “. In the same letter, the mayor also emphasized the repressive, out-of-touch nature of the French government’s policy towards cannabis growers and consumers.
🍁Aujourd’hui, avec une cinquantaine de personnalités de tous horizons , nous nous mobilisons dans @leJDD pour un droit à l’expérimentation locale de la légalisation encadrée du cannabis !
Je vous explique pourquoi dans un fil 🧶 ⤵️
— Clément Rossignol Puech (@clemrossignol) June 4, 2023
“France is one of the most repressive countries in the world when it comes to drugs, with the overwhelming majority of trials involving small-scale cannabis dealers, thus contributing significantly to the overcrowding of French courts and prisons, with no impact on the prevalence of consumption“, wrote Clément Rossignol Puech at the time, adding that the State, at various levels, was“helplessly witnessingthe trivialization of cannabis among young people and the deterioration of security in certain neighborhoods plagued by drug trafficking”.
The proposal put forward by the ecologist mayor of Bègles is based on the recommendations of the French Economic and Social Council (CESE), which on January 24 came out in favor of supervised legalization of cannabis.
The CESE, whose opinion is only consultative in the eyes of the public authorities, proposed that the State should regulate the production, distribution and consumption of the herb that makes people laugh, basing itself on the examples of legalization in Canada and Malta, and castigating in passingthe “abject failure of the policy followed for fifty years” in France.
A round-table discussion on the legalization of cannabis in a pilot town will be held on June 15 at the Red Cross Regional Training Center in Bègles.
