Towards a regulatory framework for legalized cannabis in France

While there is a wind of legalization of cannabis in the United States, France - a country whose legal regime for regulating this substance is one of the most prohibitive in Europe - does not seem to want to change, despite the high prevalence of users that can be observed there. Therefore, with more than 700,000 daily users, 1.4 million regular users and 4.6 million French people conceding to have consumed cannabis in the past year, according to the 2014 Baromètre Santé (Beck et al. 2015). With a fairly strict police implementation of the 1970 law against these same users, and more specifically a minority of them, the social damage attributable to cannabis is to be sought on the side of its political framework, rather than solely against the consequences of its use (Ben Lakhdar and Tanvé 2013). The ineffectiveness of prohibitionist policy is further characterized by the deep damaging rooting of cannabis trafficking in some peri-urban areas of France (Kokoreff 1998; Muchielli 2007).
A change in cannabis policy in France is desirable, and the question then arises as to which policy framework to choose. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to present these possibilities in a broad perspective and to propose the use of existing regulatory and legal frameworks in France that have proven to be effective in controlling addictive behavior. The liberalization of online gambling in 2010 and the World Health Organization's Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), to which France has signed up to since 2005, thus provide a favorable framework for regulating a legalized cannabis market in France. [Extract]