Drugs at the Top: Matignon Gets Tested, Parliament Doesn’t

This piece proves nothing. It’s an opinion column, it commits no one but me, and what it contains is supposition, a strong conviction at most. I have no names to give and no documents to produce. What I have is three years of public facts, all sourced, and a question they raise on their own.

The question fits in a sentence. If drugs in the corridors of power were only a matter of a few bit players, why did the prime minister have his ministers, their staffs, his prefects and his ambassadors tested, then decide to keep the results to himself, while Parliament, which writes the laws against drug trafficking, refuses to be tested at all?

The phrase in the excerpt above is not mine. It belongs to Louis Jublin, formerly Gabriel Attal’s communications adviser, who followed him from the finance ministry to Matignon, and who described this summer in Vanity Fair the cocaine habit he picked up in the fall of 2022: he was, he says, blowing his brains out. Several times a week, for close to a year, while his boss was running France’s public accounts. He came forward himself because a video of him snorting a line is said to be circulating in newsrooms. Gabriel Attal declined to comment.

The pattern

Only what is documented by the press or confirmed by the people involved.

March 2023. In the wake of the Pierre Palmade case, Marianne runs a feature on cocaine in French political circles. A parliamentary staffer describes the number of rolled-up straws left in office wastebaskets, and lawmakers scoring a short walk from the National Assembly.

December 2023. Renaissance MP Caroline Janvier tells Paris Match that there are evenings where drugs go around, that the phenomenon has to be understood as a system, and that politics manufactures deviant behavior. She walks it back a few days later.

October 2024. LFI lawmaker Andy Kerbrat is caught buying synthetic drugs from an underage dealer in the Paris metro. He enters treatment. He keeps his seat.

November 2024. A butler at the prime minister’s residence is taken into police custody following a cocaine handoff. A butler. The person whose job is to bring what he is asked to bring.

February 2025. Grenoble mayor Éric Piolle proposes anonymous drug testing for lawmakers and ministers, to see whether the problem reaches the circles where decisions are made. Gérald Darmanin and MP Violette Spillebout say they are willing. The president of the National Assembly, Yaël Braun-Pivet, calls the proposal “fairly ridiculous” and objects to “stigmatizing” lawmakers. In the same interview, she notes that without buyers there would be no sellers. She was talking about the French public.

December 2025. Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu’s agriculture adviser is carried out of a private party by paramedics after an overdose and dismissed. Matignon confirms the episode to Le Canard enchaîné two months later. The official gazette records a departure “at his own request.”

June 16, 2026. The same Sébastien Lecornu signs a directive mandating unannounced, compulsory saliva drug tests across ministerial staffs, prefects, ambassadors and anyone holding a security clearance. A first in the history of French government. His own office has already been tested.

June 18, 2026. Two lawmakers from the governing bloc ask Yaël Braun-Pivet to extend the testing to the National Assembly, one of them writing that it would be neither understandable nor tenable for Parliament to exempt itself from the standards it imposes on the executive. Gabriel Attal, who leads the Renaissance group, rules out testing his own members: he has no suspicions. Nothing comes of it.

July 2026. The government announces that the results will not be made public: “we are not a court,” no names and no count of positives. A journalist files a freedom-of-information request for the tally; according to France-Soir, the general secretariat of the government replies on July 8 that no such document exists, apart from the directive itself. The tests were run, and there is no written tally. A citizens’ petition demanding publication is filed on the Assembly’s website on July 6.

August 2026. The Jublin interview.

September 2026. Alexandre Macé Dubois, a deputy editor at France Télévisions, publishes “Profession dealer” with Tallandier, a year spent embedded with a trafficker. He describes deliveries made within steps of government ministries and says some politicians consume by night what they condemn by day.

All of it in a country where the state seized 84.3 tons of cocaine in 2025, an all-time record. That number says nothing about politicians. It says the product is everywhere.

The knot

Taken one at a time, each of these facts comes with its reassuring explanation. An isolated lawmaker, a fragile adviser, a butler who answers only for himself, a journalist with a book to sell. That is the official version, and it has been served up every time.

But no one goes to the trouble of mandating compulsory saliva tests for a problem they believe does not exist. The prime minister signed that directive four months after having to confirm that one of his close aides had left a party on a stretcher. The directive is an administrative admission. The refusal to publish the tally is a second one. And the absence of any written tally at all, if the general secretariat’s answer is accurate, is the most polished form of the thing: you cannot leak what was never written down. The scope is a third admission. It covers everyone who serves power, and no one who holds it by election.

That asymmetry is what convinces me, more than the butler does. Lawmakers write the anti-trafficking laws, demand exemplary conduct from the executive, and when someone suggests applying to them the test they impose on prefects, their presiding officer replies that it would be ridiculous and stigmatizing. Since when does an institution refuse an exam it is certain to pass?

What reaches the press is a floor, never a ceiling. An adviser doesn’t make the news because he uses, he makes it because he ended up in the emergency room. A butler isn’t in custody because he takes it, he’s in custody because a handoff went wrong. We only ever see the accidents, and we only ever learn the names of the bit players, because they are the only ones who can be sacrificed. A butler delivers to someone.

Why nobody talks

From the officer posted outside to the errand boy who goes to collect the order, that adds up to a lot of people in the know. And almost nothing comes out. The answer is not a conspiracy. It’s worse: a sum of individual interests.

The driver, the usher, the butler hold their jobs at the pleasure of the person they would be exposing. Talking means losing your job and gaining nothing, and nobody hires a household employee who talked.

The officer on duty witnessed nothing officially. A report about a ministerial office ends up in a drawer, when it doesn’t come back to bite him.

The journalist knows, cannot prove it, and publishing without documents means a certain lawsuit plus the end of his access to sources. Jublin says his video is circulating in several newsrooms. Not one has aired it.

The peer, minister or lawmaker, has skeletons of his own or knows that silence will protect him in turn. It’s one of the reflexes of a political class that co-opts more than it recruits. Caroline Janvier spoke up once. She qualified it within days. Gabriel Attal has “no suspicions” about his lawmakers; a few weeks later, his former adviser was describing his year on coke back at the finance ministry.

The user will never turn in his supplier, and the dealer lives off the discretion he sells.

Nobody needs to coordinate. Each of them, individually, has an interest in keeping quiet, and the result looks like a pact when it is only a sum of rational self-interests. That is sturdier than a conspiracy, because there is no one to arrest.

What stays with me

What an adult does with his own nostrils on a Saturday night is none of my business. What is my business is the hypocrisy, and it needs no numbers to be true. The same establishment that passes anti-trafficking laws, that makes street-corner dealing the central issue of municipal elections, that sends police into the housing projects, is funding out of its own pocket, at night, the networks it claims to fight by day. Every gram delivered near a ministry is a euro paid to the supply chain we claim to be dismantling, the very one I once described as building a counter-state more effective than the Republic on the black market prohibition handed it.

We will not learn how many there are. Not because it cannot be known, but because the system was designed so that it wouldn’t be: tests whose tally is hidden for those who serve, and no tests at all for those who decide. When an institution refuses an exam it imposes on everyone else, it has just answered the question it was asked.