Une « épidémie de drogue » en France dans les années 1960-1980 ?

Abstract

In 1970, drug legislation was strengthened in France in a context where the press and politicians were denouncing a “drug epidemic.” The use of such a metaphor invites us to study both the number of drug addicts in France at that time and the social imaginary surrounding the issue of drug addiction. The article aims to achieve this dual objective by focusing on four key moments of this period, up until the shift towards harm reduction in the 1990s: the moral panic of the “1968 years” that led to new legislation; the poorly understood poly-addictions of the 1970s; the “invisible catastrophe” of mass heroin addiction in the 1980s; and finally, the AIDS epidemic that forced health authorities to develop new tools to better quantify the number of heavy drug users. The conclusions of this investigation lead us to understand the stakes of the dramatization in public discourse and the unintended consequences of prohibition.

Keywords

• statistics
• drug addiction
• public policy
• invisibilization of drug addiction
• diffusion of drug use