France is suffering a ‘cancer’ of drug dealing, with no ‘safe places’ left, the country’s justice minister admitted as he positions himself for a presidential run.

Gérald Darmanin said in a recent interview that even the ‘smallest rural town’ in France is now ‘familiar with cocaine and cannabis’.

‘Drugs, for example, have always existed, but today we can clearly see that in the smallest rural town, they know about cocaine, cannabis.’

‘Beforehand, drugs were simply in big towns [and cities] or the metro,’ he told Legend in an interview published on Sunday.

‘What really strikes the French is that it has become widespread, metastasized,’ he added.

‘It’s no longer just in the places where we were looking for the potential problem’ he added, suggesting France has become ‘more violent’.

Darmanin voiced support for sweeping security measures to ensure a ‘safe society’ – a risky curtailing of personal liberties as he looks towards the 2027 presidential election.

‘If you want a safe society, you need facial recognition, for example, which we don’t have today.’

‘It’s thanks to AI applied to cameras that we are able to observe crowd movements, that we were able to observe strange behavior,’ he added.

The former Minister of the Interior said France ‘thwarted three attacks during the Olympic Games’, arresting an 18-year-old Russian national suspected of planning to commit an ‘Islamist-inspired’ attack in Saint Etienne.

Illustrating his argument, Darmanin added: ‘In Dubai, we see your face and we know your identity, what your criminal record is, if you are wanted.’

Asked by interviewer Guillaume Pley why France had not adopted such measures, he referenced ‘paranoia about technology’ and ‘civil liberties’.

‘Unfortunately, Parliament has always opposed it until now. We must all evolve for the safety of the French,’ he added in a post on X on Monday, after the interview aired.

Not all agreed. Jean-Philippe Tanguy, deputy of the French National Assembly, jibed: ‘Does the Minister of Justice know that he was Minister of the Interior for years?’

‘Taking the French for fools by making so-called strong statements when the death toll is so low and catastrophic is still crazy,’ he added.

Cocaine use in France has nearly doubled in a matter of a few years, according to a recent study.

An estimated 1.1 million people took the drug at least once in 2023 – up from 600,000 when the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) last published its report in 2022.

France now ranks 7th in Europe for cocaine consumption.

Ivana Obradovic, deputy director at OFDT, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that part of the reason for the increase in drug use was ‘the evolution of working conditions’.

People were using cocaine to cope with intense workloads or tough working conditions, she said.

Perception of drug purity, and the relative stability of price, may have also contributed to the change, she suggested. 

While prices have remained virtually unchanged, the purity of cocaine is said to be on the rise. 

Data from the EU’s drug monitoring agency EMCDDA showed how a relative price of 100 in 2011 had fallen to 98 by 2021.

A benchmark purity of 100 meanwhile climbed to 143 in the same period.

The rise of drug gangs has seen violence flare up. Ten people were killed last year in such clashes.

As many as 341 were injured, The Times reports.

Across the country, at least 16 hotspots of violence have been uncovered in recent years, from Nimes – where a 10-year-old boy was killed in suspected drugs violence in 2023 – to Paris, as shocking statistics of death and destruction emerge on an almost daily basis. 

Once mainly associated with Marseille, gun battles between drug gangs have become more frequent in Grenoble, and have even begun spreading out into cities including Poitiers, Clermont-Ferrand, Valence, and Villeurbanne.

In Valence, a 22-year-old man was shot dead and two others wounded as they queued outside a nightclub for a Halloween party on Thursday night; the following day an 18-year-old was gunned down and killed in a suburb of the same town.

In Villeurbanne, a suburb of Lyon, a man was shot dead, and in Clermont-Ferrand a teenager is in a critical condition after receiving a bullet in the head.

Prosecutors said only on Saturday that 21 suspects in a series of coordinated attacks on French prisons had been charged, including two teenagers.

Investigators believe the attacks were carried out by drug traffickers, with at least one suspect thought to have ties to a notorious cartel.

Attackers in April struck at several jails and other facilities across France, torching cars, spraying the entrance of one prison with automatic gunfire and leaving mysterious inscriptions.

A total of 30 people, including four minors, were arrested this week in police raids across France. Seven of them were released without charge.

The justice minister appears to be distancing himself from President Emmanuel Macron as he eyes a possible run for the top job himself.

Darmanin, with Macron’s liberal Renaissance party, announced in late April that he would like to be president and was ‘working’ on a platform.

Macron himself will be unable to run in 2027 after serving two consecutive terms.

The 2024 election, called by Macron following the European Parliament elections last June, saw growing divisions in the French National Assembly.

In the EP elections, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally came out as the leading party, with 31.4 per cent of the vote.

Rallying against the hard right, the left wing alliance New Popular Front won 188 seats in the legislative elections – short of a majority, but ahead of the 142 won by the National Rally.

Ensemble, Macron’s centrist coalition, lost, but took 161 seats, which was higher than pollsters predicted. 

289 seats were needed for an overall majority in the 577-seat assembly. 

Separately, in his interview on Sunday, Darmanin apologised for the first time to Liverpool supporters for the policing operation at the 2022 Champions League final in Paris.

Darmanin said ‘we got the measures wrong’ in the interview broadcast on YouTube.

The final between Liverpool and Real Madrid at the Stade de France was overshadowed by a 37-minute delay to kick-off as fans struggled to access the entrances after being funnelled into overcrowded bottlenecks as they approached the stadium.

Darmanin initially blamed Liverpool fans for the disorder and claimed many had turned up without tickets.

Three years on, he admitted in the interview that the authorities had got it wrong.

‘Yes, it was a failure,’ said Darmanin.

‘Because I hadn’t checked what was happening properly, which was my mistake, and because I gave in to preconceived ideas.

‘I apologise to Liverpool fans. Of course they were right to (feel angry).’

Nervy police fired tear gas towards thousands of supporters locked behind metal fences on the perimeter of the stadium.

Liverpool fans had to suffer a series of false claims in the aftermath of the chaos.

European football’s governing body UEFA initially tried to pin the blame on supporters arriving late despite thousands having been held for hours outside the stadium before kick-off.

The French authorities then claimed an ‘industrial-scale fraud’ of fake tickets was the problem.

A French Senate enquiry later concluded that poorly-executed security arrangements were the cause of the mayhem.

An independent report found UEFA bore ‘primary responsibility’ for the failures which almost led to the match becoming a ‘mass fatality catastrophe’.

The report added it was ‘remarkable’ that no one was killed on the night of the final.

Real Madrid won the final 1-0.