TRETS, France -- Franck Verlaque was bad news, and everyone here knew it. In and out of trouble since his teens, he was, at 23, an ex-con and, his parents said, a drug abuser. He drove recklessly through this quaint village in southern France, drank heavily and terrorized his family.


Then, in September, to no one's great surprise, Franck was shot to death. The killer turned out to be his own father, a merchant who recently had added the words "Andre Verlaque and Son" to the sign outside his television sales shop.


As his only child lay dying in a shed next to their house, the stocky 52-year-old walked to the nearby police station and said simply, "I've just killed my son." He was handcuffed and led off to jail.


After two weeks, Andre Verlaque was released pending a charge of voluntary homicide.


The community was enraged, not by the shooting but by the arrest. Everyone said Andre Verlaque was a good man, an honest man. The real culprits, they decided, were the drugs that have reached into ever smaller corners of France, turning youths such as Franck into uncontrollable demons.


Trets circulated a petition, contending that Franck's death "could not, in good conscience, be considered a crime" and asking that Andre be acquitted. The drive quickly collected 5,800 signatures -- 200 more than the town's population.


"Sadly, drugs have arrived in our small village," said Francois Coquillat, a butcher and lifelong friend of the elder Verlaque who led the petition drive. "The Verlaque family did everything for their son. They gave him everything. But, in these last days, Franck had become a veritable beast."


No one outside his family really knew if Franck was a drug addict. His mother said so. And Franck did take tranquilizers, often exceeding the dosage the doctor recommended to calm him down. But hard drugs? No one in town had ever seen him take them.


But the rush to blame drugs for the shooting, and the sympathy that Trets quickly won across the country, symbolized a deeper current in modern France: the frustration and fear felt by people watching drug abuse unravel the fabric of their society from Paris to the smallest villages.


When the case comes to court next year, the question will be whether Andre Verlaque, during an argument over car tires, killed his unarmed son out of genuine fear for the safety of his family, as he claims, or out of simple frustration with an errant son.


Either way, the villagers in Trets believe he deserves to be acquitted.


In France, drugs were once considered by most to be an American big-city phenomenon, no closer to everyday life than television and movies. Now, in many cases, the problem of drug-abusing youngsters is as close as the corner cafe.


Recent studies have counted more than 150,000 heroin addicts in France, 10 times greater than just a few years ago.


Police in Paris recently seized six pounds of crack cocaine, the largest haul in the city's history. More than 45,000 people were arrested in France for drug offenses last year, and of those, 64 percent were younger than 25.