The sale and use of cocaine and other drugs should no longer be punishable. This was stated by the mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, in an interview with a Dutch newspaper, the National News Agency of the Netherlands ANP reported. According to the mayor, the fight against drugs is counterproductive. Drug markets must be regulated to undermine the revenue model of “unscrupulous criminals”, she told the newspaper.
A spokesman for Halsema clarified that Halsema is not advocating “rushed legalization” but regulation that takes drug trafficking out of the hands of criminals, as is the case, for example, with the controlled legal supply of cannabis in establishments called coffeeshops.
This is not the first time Halsema has advocated for a different drug policy. In October 2022, at a conference on organized crime, she said that “the war on drugs is not working.” The mayor also expressed hope that individual states would begin to look at drug use differently and that an “alternative strategy” should be formulated.
At the beginning of this month, the mayor warned in a comment in the British newspaper “Guardian” that the Netherlands is at risk of becoming a drug state. “The growth of the global drug trade means that we need international solutions,” wrote Halsema, quoted by BTA.
She told the newspaper that there was a market for stimulants and that hundreds of years of repression had achieved “a hell of a lot”. “Around 80 percent of our police capacity is spent on drug-related crime. In the Netherlands and Belgium, street prices for cocaine have been exactly the same for years. So you can only conclude that the incredible amount of effort has had no effect on the market.”
According to Halsema, instead of imposing repression, it is better to destroy the revenue model of criminals. “I am part of a growing group of academics and administrators who say that the international war on drugs is having such effects that we are now suffering more from it than from the drugs themselves.”
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2024-01-25 20:53:00
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