Georges Apap, Former Public Prosecutor to the Court of Justice of Valance, France.

It is well known that the French repressive system against drugs is characterized by severity unparalleled in Europe and by penal provisions which are shocking because they fall outside the scope of common law and constitute exceptional legislation. We shall cite two particularly pertinent examples from the many available: the period of detention can be doubled for narcotics: a (suspected) murderer cannot be detained for more than forty-eight hours, whereas someone apprehended for smoking a joint can be detained for four days! The tribunal correctionnel which normally cannot pronounce sentences of imprisonment for more than five years, can hand down sentences of up to forty years for drug trafficking.

It is perhaps to appease his conscience for such monstrosities that, with the law of 1970, the legislator ventured to propose medical intervention as an alternative to repression.

This is a practice well known in France as a therapy injunction, whereby the public prosecutor exempts the drug user from prosecution if he agrees to undergo treatment for detoxification. Similarly, if proceedings are introduced, the court will have the option of absolving the drug user from any sentencing, if he agrees to undergo such treatment.

It is worth pointing out first of all that, as a non- repressive measure, medical intervention aims to get the drug user to cease and abstain - and thus to deprive him - from a substance he has decided to use.

It is therefore not an alternative to, but another form of, repression, namely a medical repression, i.e. a prohibitionist echo of legal repression.

By the same token, this alternative is discredited because the purpose of medicine is not to come to the aid of ineffective, albeit harsh, legislation.

On the contrary, the mission of medicine is to provide care, advice and guidance for the patient, only when the user considers that his bodily integrity has been impaired to the point that he has to seek medical care of his own free will.

Further to this preliminary remark, we should also note the contradictory connotations of the two terms "therapy" and "injunction." It takes a singular case of shortsightedness to imagine that mandatory treatment can be successful in any way.

It would also take a complete lack of understanding of a drug addict's mentality to presume that he is going to accept to consider himself as being sick, when he sees himself as merely a user. How is one to get him to admit that he must undergo compulsory medical treatment, when he sees his alcoholic father drink himself to a cirrhosis of the liver at leisure, or his mother smoke her way to lung cancer without attracting any attention or concern.

Finally, the role reversal involved in a therapy injunction cannot be ignored.

More specifically, the detoxication treatment, a medical act, is ordered by magistrates who in the process become prescribing doctors and thus assume the role of physicians.

Through a comparable transfer, the doctor, who undertakes to treat the person in question in an authoritarian manner, will act

as judge and jury over that person's freedom, as he will decide on whether the treatment is to be provided in an open or closed environment, and in the latter case, on the permission granted to leave a hospital turned into prison, temporarily or definitely.

Furthermore, required to report on the shortcomings of the purported patient to the magistrate who has designated him, the doctor will decide the fate of the person concerned by such reports, which will be used as grounds for legal proceedings (whereby the doctor acts as prosecutor) or sentencing (whereby the doctor acts as a court).

In practice, we observe that doctors do not report to judicial authorities purported patients who refuse to undergo treatment, and we understand why. The flow of information is somehow not that smooth.

Yet this overlapping of authority further underscores their confusion. The repressive mission assigned to the doctor by the law is all the more demonstrated.

The virulence and scope of the foregoing objections is lost in practice, as therapy injunction is used less and less.

This is due first of all to technical reasons: such a measure can only be ordered if drug use is not linked to any other offense. Now what user is not concurrently in possession of drugs and thus guilty of a separate offense which could get him ten years in jail? Very often, the user is also a small-time dealer, which can get him twenty years in prison.

Whence the reduced scope of the therapy injunction.

In addition, it has been a flagrant failure. No one nowadays seriously believes in the efficiency of a measure decided through coercion which has never managed to cure anyone.

It is high time for the French legislator to accept and admit that medical repression has been no more successful than legal repression and to repeal a law which has already caused so much harm.