Drug law enforcement enjoys an aura of prestige in French policing circles. For several decades, generations of civil servants and others employed in specialized law enforcement units have implemented their share of drug policy without always fully controlling the effects of their intervention and much less its causes. Drug supply reduction by law enforcement has gained a margin of autonomy and tends to grow in scope. In France, as in much of the rest of the world, seizure and arrest statistics play a key role in the "ceremony of drug control" (Manning 2004), now a central component of official discourse about crime and security.
Illicit drug trafficking and the fight against drug supply are a constant source of popular beliefs and simplifications. There is a clear distortion between this perception and the knowledge built up. A historical glance at the availability of illicit drugs on the (local or international) markets suggests two things: the ability of drug traffickers to evade law enforcement barriers and the permanence of drug supply structures due to a level of inefficiency of law enforcement linked with the division of labor in the repressive response (police, justice, and customs). One could define the reduction measures implemented in the field of drug supply in Europe as judicial and administrative techniques implemented with financial and human resources in order to dry up the production and above all the distribution of illicit drugs.
This chapter attempts to provide a partial answer to the following question: why don't drug law enforcement institutions use more of the knowledge available to them in order to improve their practice against drug supply? Our main hypothesis is that one of the foremost concerns of drug enforcement institutions is to maintain and perpetuate the flows of public resources that they receive. [Intro]