Heroin markets in Paris in the years 1968-2000: Prohibition, at the heart of the dynamics of drug diffusion?

Where do the drug markets in the city come to be housed? To be interested in spaces, public or private, where illegal substances are acquired and sold in Paris during this period of accelerated consumption and intense urban and social change that the late 20th Century (1968-2000) constituted, is to witness the emergence and gradual construction of a market, its changes and its permanent movements from one end of the capital to the other, as well as to be led to question the dynamics of an ever-wider diffusion of products. At the end of the 1960s, only a few insiders used heroin in France. In the mid-1990s, this product became so widespread that, through the combined effects of AIDS, overdoses and the legal and social effects of "drug addiction" (impoverishment, rise in crime, frequent incarcerations, etc.), its consumption was at the root of what was described as a "health and social disaster", particularly in working class neighborhoods. What has happened in last 15-20 years? How has such a large diffusion been possible? This is what a group of researchers working between 2013 and 2015 on a "Social and cultural history of the spread of heroin use and trafficking in France in the year 1968-2004', (the "Hero" study)", based in particular on the collective memories of its actors and on an interview campaign, tried to understand.
This chapter draws its sources from part of the corpus compiled in this context, namely some 60 interviews conducted in Paris and the surrounding region with people of various ages, social backgrounds and those who consumed and/or sold this product during the period, as well as some 50 written testimonies (autobiographical or fictionalized, for some contemporaries of the period, for others later) and a collection of various archives, from the press, associations and institutions. [Extract]