[Management of drug addiction in France (a short history)]

A brief history of drug addiction in France can be garnered from a combination of the fragmented testimonies of physicians, social scientists, drug users, and of the OFDT reports edited since the middle of the nineties. It shows a tremendous evolution in the nature of drugs abused and the number of addicts, taking place in less than fifty years, from a small number of opiate addicts restricted to the major French ports to two separate drug scenes (urban and festive) accounting for several hundred thousand people. Those two scenes have shown a tendency to merge following the unification of drug trafficking. The failure of the repression policy initialized in 1970 was responsible of the AIDS and hepatitis epidemic which resulted in the introduction of large scale substitution treatments in 1996. Initiated to reduce contamination risks, later on, they were recognized as an effective treatment of heroin addiction. Beside the positive effects of this "French revolution", emergence of buprenorphine as a new urban drug must be accounted and dealt with.