Opioïdes : nouveaux produits et nouvelles tendances d’usage en France

The current death rate by opioids overdoses in North American countries resulted in an important media coverage to the extension of synthetic opioid antalgic drugs prescriptions in France and its sanitary consequences. The competition with, on one hand, the emergence of the offer of new illicit synthetic drugs on the internet and, on the other hand, the integration, still moderate, of opioid antalgics to the spectrum of products consumed by drug users, tends to create some confusion clouding the understanding of this situation. In this article, on the basis of a corpus of quantitative and qualitative data from multiple sources, the authors distinguished different phenomena, involved populations and factors affecting their evolutions. Three main phenomena have been identified: dependencies and overdoses following antalgic treatments in the general population – not by far as important as across the Atlantic –, the evolution of opioids consumption in poly drug users – still involving mostly more ancient products – and, finally, the current entry in our national territory of synthetic drugs ordered on the Internet, that gives them only a marginal presence although not completely without risks.