10-05-2025
Paris nursery that shows how France has lost control to drug gangs
Teachers at the Émile Zola nursery school had become accustomed to the little cellophane packets tossed over the wall into the playground by drug dealers fleeing the police. Sometimes a child would pick one up and maybe even take it home and present it to a shocked parent in the Paris suburb of Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine.
The final straw came this year, however, when a laughing-gas canister tossed from a tower block balcony smashed the window of the school library.
'It really worried the teachers,' Sébastien Phan, an opposition councillor, told me last week. 'If it had hit a child standing in the courtyard, it could have killed them.'
What happened next shocked many people even more: in an implicit admission that the police could not protect
