Belgian and Dutch police have got more money to interdict drug smuggling in the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam. Record amounts of cocaine were seized in 2022.
Yet the black-market price of cocaine is unchanged. Factoring in inflation, the drug has arguably become cheaper.
An analysis of European wastewater suggests that cocaine use in major cities, including those of the Low Countries, has increased.
“We are in a tunnel, where more and more resources are being allocated with no discernible result,” argues Bob Hoogenboom, a professor in police studies at the University of Amsterdam. Hoogenboom is also a co-founder of the Dutch branch of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a nonprofit of former police officers and prosecutors who want to end the drug war.
So far, their appeals have fallen on deaf ears. (more…)
Manhattan, New York at night, April 2, 2020 (Unsplash/Peter Olexa)
A panel of external experts has advised the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve over-the-counter sales of naloxone nasal spray.
Naloxone is an affordable and risk-free way to save drug users from an overdose. The spray costs $250 without insurance and prevents deaths from fentanyl, heroin and painkillers. Naloxone has no effect on people who are sober.
Only 29 states allow pharmacists to sell naloxone without a prescription. Even in the states that allow over-the-counter sales, there isn’t enough of the stuff. A study published in The Lancet estimates that 1,270 more naloxone kits are needed for every 100,000 residents to avoid 80 percent of opioid overdose deaths. (more…)
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez speaks at a congress of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party in Huesca, October 1, 2019 (PSOE/Eva Ercolanese)
The constitutional crisis triggered by Spain’s highest court a week before New Year’s has ended with a whimper.
The Constitutional Court suspended a debate in parliament for the first time since the end of the dictatorship. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez spoke of “an unprecedented situation in our democracy.”
At stake were reforms of the Constitutional Court itself. Sánchez’ left-wing coalition had proposed to lower the threshold needed to appoint justices from three-fifths to a simple majority in order to override a veto by the conservative People’s Party.
A majority in Congress, the Spanish lower house, approved the reforms. The People’s Party then asked the court to stop a debate in the Senate, arguing the changes were improperly introduced: as an amendment to penal reforms rather than a separate law. The six justices appointed by the People’s Party, including two whose terms had expired and who refused to recuse themselves, agreed this technicality warranted an historic breach of the separation of powers. The five appointed by Sánchez’ Socialist Workers’ Party sided with the government.
It was a new low in the politicization of the Spanish judiciary. After Sánchez became prime minister in 2018, a minority of conservative lawmakers blocked every judicial appointment they could. Their hope was to overturn the social democrat’s liberalizations, including the legalization of euthanasia and recognition of transgenders, and prevent the Constitutional Court from changing hands before the election in December.
Conservatives finally relented, and agreed to confirm three progressive judges, in order to avoid a permanent lowering of the required majority. That means Sánchez’ other reforms are probably safe. (more…)
United States Capitol in Washington DC, January 15, 2017 (DoD/William Lockwood)
American lawmakers managed to cram everything from a TikTok ban on government phones to a delay in fishing regulations (really) into this year’s $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill, but somehow drug reforms that had bipartisan support in the House of Representatives were omitted from the Senate version.
Tori Otten reports for The New Republic that proposals to allow cannabis stores to open bank accounts and end sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine were taken out at the last minute. (more…)
Constitutional Court in Madrid, Spain at night (Europa Press)
Conservatives have plunged Spain into what Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez describes as “an unprecedented situation in our democracy” and Catalonia’s El Nacional calls “the biggest institutional challenge between powers in Spain since the attempted coup d’état of 1981.”
“You have silenced parliament,” Sánchez told opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo on Wednesday, who convinced a majority of the Constitutional Court’s justices to block a Senate debate about reforms that would allow Sánchez to replace four of them.
The six justices in the majority were all appointed by Feijóo’s People’s Party. The five progressive justices sided with Sánchez, a social democrat.
According to Germany’s Die Zeit, it is the first time since the return of democracy to Spain that the Constitutional Court has intervened in the legislative process.
Opposition has blocked Sánchez’ nominees
Since Sánchez became prime minister in 2018, the right-wing opposition has vetoed all his judicial nominations, which require supermajorities in both chambers of parliament.
In an attempt to break the deadlock, Sánchez proposed to reduce the required majority for Constitutional Court appointments down from three-fifths.
The proposal passed the lower house with the support of left-wing and Basque and Catalan separatist parties.
The same coalition abolished the crimes for which Catalonia’s leading separatists were prosecuted when the People’s Party was last in power. Sánchez had already pardoned those found guilty of sedition and misuse of public funds by organizing an independence referendum in defiance of the Constitutional Court.
Feijóo on Wednesday accused Sánchez of “perfecting his obedience to the Catalan independence movement.”
Conservatives are alarmed
Catalan nationalism has become the primary motivator of the Spanish right. Whereas Sánchez hopes concessions to the Catalans will convince a majority to remain in Spain, conservatives smell treason and believe the only way to prevent Catalan secession is to crack down.
Conservatives are also alarmed by Sánchez’ expansion of abortion rights, legalization of euthanasia and recognition of transgenders. Some cling to the hope that the Constitutional Court might overturn those reforms.
Judges refuse to recuse
The right may be able to outsmart Sánchez for another year, when elections are due. Polls predict a People’s Party victory. To many Spanish voters, concessions to Catalans are worse than a judicial power grab.
That would require four justices — three conservatives, one progressive — to remain in office for another year. Their mandates expired in June.
The government had asked those justices whose mandates were affected by the reforms to recuse themselves from hearing Feijóo’s challenge but they refused, in effect extending their terms to vote against their replacement.
Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez chairs a meeting of Socialist Workers’ Party lawmakers in Madrid, June 1 (PSOE/Eva Ercolanese)
Spain’s ruling left-wing parties have abolished the crimes for which Catalonia’s independence leaders were imprisoned — and the right has gone berserk. Conservative deputies called the penal reforms an “assault on democracy”. The far right called Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez a “traitor”. (They do so frequently.)
When the reforms came to a vote in Congress, members of the conservative People’s Party (PP) sat on their hands. The center-right Citizens and far-right Vox (Voice) walked out in protest. So much for their commitment to democracy.
Indeed, it was the PP’s disinterest in Catalan democracy that culminated in the imprisonment of half the Catalan government and the suspension of Catalan home rule. Sánchez is doing little more than clean up the mess they made. (more…)
German health minister Karl Lauterbach (Bundesministerium für Gesundheit)
Germany plans to legalize the sale of recreational cannabis in 2024.
Germany allows medical use of cannabis, but it is seldom prescribed. Karl Lauterbach, the health minister, wants to license the production, distribution and sale of recreational cannabis. Consumers would be allowed to buy up to 30 grams in specialized stores and they could grow three cannabis plants at home. All criminal cases would be closed.
There would be quality requirements, but no price regulation. Lauterbach left open the possibility of a cannabis tax on top of sales tax (19 percent), but cautioned that legal cannabis must be competitive with the black market. (more…)
Dutch justice minister Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius listens to a debate in parliament in The Hague, June 2 (ANP/Sem van der Wal)
A consortium of Dutch investigate journalists discovered that the country spent €900 million to fight organized drug crime in the last five years without making a single arrest.
I write for Normaal Over Drugs, a campaign to normalize the drug debate, that the five-year failure is the umpteenth failure of repression, and the more reasonable policy is legalization. (more…)
View from the Dam Square in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, October 15, 2019 (Antonio Molinari)
Regular readers may remember I wrote in May about Amsterdam’s plan to ban the sale of cannabis to tourists. At the time, Mayor Femke Halsema argued a ban would help reduce drug tourism.
Studies have since found it won’t, so the mayor has found a new argument: licensed cannabis retailers are linked to organized crime.
Cannabis expert Nicole Maalsté and I have written a joint op-ed in response for Het Parool, the newspaper of Amsterdam. I’ll summarize our arguments here for non-Dutch readers.
Maalsté does research into medical marijuana at the University of Utrecht and runs the advisory Acces Interdit. (more…)
Port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands at night (Dreamstime/Péter Gudella)
Dutch police chief Andy Kraag revealed in an interview this month that three out of four of his detectives are working on drug cases.
Even if that’s a mild exaggeration (Kraag meant to underscore the scope of the drug problem), police for sure devote more resources to drugs than any other crime. 20 to 30 percent of their budget, between €1.1 and €1.6 billion, goes to fighting the drug war every year.
Drugs are only 1.6 percent of all reported crimes in the Netherlands. I argue in Sargasso, a Dutch news and opinion blog, that police priorities aren’t just wrong; they’re dangerous. Worse criminals go unpunished.
Not all crimes are the same
Police will argue not all crimes are reported and not all crimes are the same. Vandalizing a busstop and smuggling 500 kilograms of cocaine are both counted as “a” crime. That doesn’t mean they deserve equal police time.
So I compare drugs with another underreported but high-impact crime: sexual assault. Reportedly 1.1 percent of all crimes, experts believe the real figure is at least ten times that. When asked which crimes police should prioritize, most Dutch people would rank sexual violence in second place after murder.
Last year, police found a suspect in 51 percent of sexual-assault cases, down from 66 percent in 2020. Of those, 34 percent were brought to trial within six months. Both police and prosecutors say their goal is 80 percent. They’ve never met it. They don’t have the resources to investigate and prosecute all cases. When a Dutch news program requested the figures earlier this year, they learned that 808 investigations into sexual violence were on hold due to lack of funding or manpower or both.
There is no such backlog in drug cases. Between 2015 and 2019, the number of police investigations into organized drug crime alone — not counting small-time dealers and drug labs — nearly doubled from 341 to 613.
In 2019, parliament gave police an extra €15 million to investigate sexual assaults. It raised funding for the drug war by €150 million. It’s not just the police whose priorities are out of whack.
War on drugs
Including prevention programs, prosecutions and prisons, the war on drugs costs the Dutch taxpayer between €1.8 and €2.7 billion per year.
It’s not that the money goes to waste. Thousands of drug labs have been dismantled. The amount of cocaine intercepted in the port of Rotterdam has quadrupled in four years, from 20,000 to 80,000 kilos. One in ten cases police bring to prosecutors are drug-related. Half are taken to court. (Remember the figure for rapists was a third.) One in five prisoners were convicted of a drug crime.
Yet the price of cocaine hasn’t budged from €50 per gram in fifteen years. (Lower than in the United States.) It seems the more drugs customs and police intercept, the more drug cartels ship to Europe. Cocaine production in South America is believed to have tripled in the last ten years.
Half of under-35s in the Netherlands have tried ecstasy, the country’s most popular drug after cannabis, which is manufactured locally. Only 3 percent used ecstasy in the last year. The figures for amphetamines, cocaine and other drugs are even lower, and below the European average. Drug use in the Netherlands is low — and stable.
Some 130,000 Dutch people are addicted to drugs, half to cannabis, which is decriminalized. 600,000 are addicted to opioids and one million to either alcohol or tobacco. All of which are legal.
224 drug users died of an overdose or complication in 2018, the most recent figure available. 20,000 smokers die in the Netherlands every year. Alcoholism kills almost 2,000. But cops aren’t chasing brewers and bartenders.
Circular logic
For every action there is a reaction. When police devote more resources to fighting a crime, criminals will devote more resources to evading them — or resort to more brutal methods.
Sometimes the tradeoff is worth it. If we’re talking about child-pornography rings or human traffickers, I’m less worried about escalation than I am about saving the victims.
But most “victims” of drug crime are criminals, not users: teenagers from poor families, who are recruited to sell drugs, and who tend to end up either in prison or dead; dock workers, customs officials, security guards, even police officers, who are bribed or threatened to look the other way in the port of Rotterdam.
Police and government officials point to the destructive effect not of drugs, but of drug crime — on families, neighborhoods and businesses — to argue it would be “naive” to legalize drugs. That is circular logic: criminalizing drugs has led to suffering and violence, which is why drugs must be criminal.
At least half the rapists in the Netherlands go free, because our detectives are investigating an unending stream of drug criminals. We spend billions of euros to fight drug crime each year. Yet every year, the crime gets worse and drug use remains stable. We are doing more of the same and expecting a different outcome. What is that if not naive?
There’s good news and bad news from the drugs front in Amsterdam.
The good news is that a new coalition government of Labor, liberal Democrats and Greens want to pilot the legal sale of MDMA, also known as ecstasy. The three parties won the municipal elections in March.
The national government, in which the liberal Democrats rule with three center-right parties (including my own), has agreed to study the decriminalization of MDMA, although for medicinal use. A majority in the Amsterdam city council want to regulate recreational use as well.
The bad news is that Mayor Femke Halsema is still trying to convince the council to ban the sale of cannabis to tourists. I wrote an op-ed against her proposal in the NRC newspaper in April and have another story about it in Het Parool, the newspaper of Amsterdam.
The arguments used by both sides in Amsterdam will sound familiar to Americans. Proponents of decriminalization want to reduce harm. Opponents fear it would lead to more drug use. (more…)
Cannabis store in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Unsplash/Jan Zwarthoed)
Experts and retailers caution against it, but the mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema, is determined to ban the sale of cannabis to tourists.
In an op-ed for the NRC newspaper, I explain why it’s such a bad idea. Far from deterring the worst tourists, a ban would lead to more petty crime, more public consumption of weed and more nuisance to residents.
Quim Torra enters the parliament of Catalonia to be sworn in as regional president, May 14, 2018 (Parlament de Catalunya/Miguel González de la Fuente)
Catalan nationalists, up to and including the deposed regional president Carles Puigdemont, see the Spanish judiciary as part of a “deep state” that frustrates Catalan ambitions at every turn.
It does have judges who are more political, and more reactionary, than the rest of Western Europe. I saw the consequences after more than two million Catalans defied a Constitutional Court ban to vote in an independence referendum in 2017. (I lived in Barcelona at the time.) Politicians and protest leaders were arrested and imprisoned. Spanish courts overturned a Catalan presidential election. As recently as last week, judges ordered a Catalan lawmaker to give up his seat in the regional parliament. Spanish “lawfare” against the Catalan independence movement has entered its fifth year. (more…)
Illustration from the cover of Der Spiegel, October 16
Der Spiegel makes a mockery of the Dutch drug policy. Under the header “Käse, Koks und Killer” (Cheese, Coke and Killers; English version here), the German weekly portrays the Netherlands’ stereotypical Frau Antje with a joint between her lips, a Kalashnikov in one hand and a round cheese stuffed with cocaine in the other. The Netherlands, it claims, is “terrorized” by drug traffickers.
To Germans who are thinking of following the Dutch in decriminalizing cannabis, Der Spiegel has a clear warning: don’t, or we’ll suffer the consequences. (more…)
Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Poland at dusk, December 4, 2020 (Unsplash/Iwona Castiello d’Antonio)
Poland has escalated its rule-of-law dispute with the rest of the European Union by arguing its own laws supersede the EU’s, and indeed some EU laws are incompatible with the Polish Constitution.
The decision of the Constitutional Tribunal caps six years of legal battle that began when Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice party returned to power in 2015.
Here is a timeline of events and a look at what could happen next. (more…)
