Policy Paradigms, Ideas, and Interests: The Case of the French Public Health Policy toward Drug Abuse

The goal of this article is to analyze (1) how and why French public policy of care to drug users remained until 1995 a policy primarily curative, devoted only to proven drug addicts, directed toward abstinence, and mobilizing mainly the psychotherapeutic techniques inspired by the psychoanalytical paradigm, whereas the majority of the other European countries, answering to the brutal epidemic of AIDS, had, as of the middle of the eighties, started a palliative policy of risk reduction envisaging, among other measurements, the massive distribution of substitute products such as methadone and (2) how and why France brutally revised its positions, in the middle of the nineties, to adopt a policy of harm reduction and by doing this aligned itself, more or less, with the orientations followed by the other European countries. This analysis led the authors to test some of the political science approaches that stress the role of ideas in policy-making processes.