Background. In France, crack use has considerably increased and has given rise to open drug scenes followed by political controversies over the best type of policy to implement.
Objectives. To analyze the evolution of the framings of cocaine crack and their intersections with public policies implemented over time.
Methods. The methodology includes a press analysis from 1986 to 2023 (1,560 articles), a documentary analysis, ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews conducted between 2019 and 2023 (54 with drug-treatment and harm reduction providers, police officers and politicians and 56 with crack users).
Results. The media and political framings contribute to construct crack users under the figure of the "undesirable", described by recurring terms such as the "madman", the "zombie" and the "crackhead". This terminology anchors social imaginaries of crack associated with danger and dehumanization, that are used to justify their social and political control. In France, it is the social precarity dimension of crack use that is highlighted in the public debate, instead of the ethno-racial dimension, which is almost never mentioned in public. At the opposite, our qualitative ethnographic data demonstrates an intersection between crack users and migrants- another term that elicits proxy terminology and highlights racial and ethnic inequalities from postcolonial France. Interviews with crack users show the extent to which they are subject to racial discrimination, both in their interactions with the police and in their access to healthcare.
Conclusions. It is important to build drug policies on scientific-evidence and not on discriminatory imaginaries.
Marie Jauffret-Roustide is a Sociologist, Research Fellow at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, in Paris, France. She has an academic background in political science, sociology and public health. Her research focuses on ethnicity, race and gender in drug policies. She also works on people with lived experience' involvement in drug policy including the analysis of the biomedicalization process of addiction and the history of peer education and community-based approaches. She leads the evaluation of drug consumption rooms in Paris with a mixed-method program focusing on public health, public order and social acceptability outcomes. She also leads an international comparative research program on harm reduction policies at an international level, with a focus on Europe and North America. She is the scientific director of the D3S "Social Science, Drugs and Society" Program at the Advanced School for Social Science (EHESS). She is a membre of the scientific committee of the European Monitoring Center on Drugs and Drug Addiction.