three people in pre-trial detention

This is the first dismantling by customs of an international network importing contraband pregabalin tablets and chemicals enabling their manufacture via Marseille, France Inter reported on Thursday. Pregabalin is a real medicine used for epilepsy. In this case, it is diverted to make a synthetic drug.

Cyber ​​customs officers also disabled a French-speaking platform for the sale of this synthetic drug according to a source close to this matter in Bercy, confirming information from the newspaper “The Parisian”. The Minister for Public Accounts, Thomas Cazenave, has been in Marseille since Thursday May 16 with customs officers who seized “precursor” products allowing the manufacture of nearly 300,000 contraband pregabalin tablets last month. They are increasing the seizures of precursor chemicals which are used in the composition of new synthetic drugs and which supply clandestine laboratories mainly located in Northern Europe and the Czech Republic. France is currently considered a transit country.

It was the search of the luggage of a passenger arriving from Greece at Marignane airport in Bouches-du-Rhône last October which allowed Marseille customs officers to discover nearly 6,000 pregabalin tablets. Six months later, the judicial investigations department of the Ministry of Finance brought down a network which supplied northern Europe. Three individuals, suspected of being at the head of this trafficking in France, were arrested at their home in the Marseille area. Investigators then seized the precursor chemicals needed to produce the equivalent of 300,000 tablets in laboratories in Europe. A French-speaking platform on the dark web, calling itself “Cosa nostra” like the Italian mafia, was also dismantled.

The three suspects were placed in pre-trial detention. Mutual legal assistance procedures are underway with Greece to try to arrest several accomplices in this international trafficking which also supplied the North American market. Minister Thomas Cazenave is due to unveil a series of measures on Friday morning in Marseille to better combat the manufacture and massive imports of synthetic drugs. Bercy wants to align customs with the investigation techniques used by Narcotics against organized crime with monitored deliveries of legal chemicals, what are called precursors and which make it easy to manufacture synthetic drugs. The objective being to locate possible clandestine laboratories on French soil, such as in the Netherlands or in Belgium where several of these laboratories have been discovered.

Customs officers must also quickly have a special synthetic drugs algorithm in the scanners that filter suspicious postal packages. This tool is already effective for cannabis and cocaine according to the customs department.