The Ministry of Health has received the new chemsex report it commissioned from Prof. Amine Benyamina, a psychiatrist specialized in addiction medicine. The ball is now in the government’s court, expected to announce in June its new sexual health roadmap.
“The present report updates the state of the chemsex phenomenon in France and proposes strategic directions for a coordinated and durable response.” By the end of February, Professor Amine Benyamina, a psychiatrist and head of the hospital department in addiction medicine, handed to the Ministry of Health his new “Chemsex Report,” an update of the first one he delivered in March 2022.
In updating his assessment, Prof. Amine Benyamina notes that “many obstacles persist” to implementing effective public health policies in response to chemsex: “Lack of official recommendations, insufficient funding, saturation of specialized centers, difficulties in referrals to city-based care, lack of epidemiological cohort data, and limitations in clinical research.” Commissioned last autumn, the forty-page document notably formulates ten recommendations that should feed the government’s next “Sexual Health” roadmap for 2025-2030. Already overdue, it is now announced for next June but “the file is on the minister’s desk”, a government source tells us.
Community Health
The insufficiency of progress, however, should not obscure the encouraging results of on-the-ground experiments. “This report places chemsex within a public health issue that requires a coordinated government response, and it highlights that there are effective solutions”, notes Catherine Delorme, president of Fédération Addiction, to têtu. Thus the Arpa-chemsex project, for “improved multidisciplinary network-based support”, which allowed testing comprehensive support offerings for chemsex users, combining sexual health prevention and harm reduction related to drug use, in several community sexual health pilot centers (CSMSS), such as Checkpoint and Spot Beaumarchais in Paris. “Harm reduction is the only true health method”, Olivier Véran, then Minister of Health, already acknowledged in an interview with têtu in 2021.
“The specialized consultation centers are useful because they reduce distrust toward the medical body”, the report notes, which argues that without this approach, “the fear of moral judgments about sexuality, drugs, or sexual orientation explains delays in care.” Moreover, Nicolas Derche, national director in charge of community health within the SOS group [co-shareholder of têtu] that runs Checkpoint-Paris, says: “These centers fail to meet all needs. It is necessary to improve territorial coverage by opening new structures.” The report therefore recommends “guaranteeing stable funding for these facilities, taking into account high demand, to avoid saturation and interruptions in care”. The ball is in the court of Stéphanie Rist, the current Minister of Health, the eighth since the delivery four years ago of the first Benyamina report Benyamina.
>> Read the Benyamina 2026 report on chemsex :
