Amsterdam mayor: selling cocaine should no longer be a criminal offense | Abroad

A spokesperson for Halsema tells the ANP news agency that she is not advocating “rash legalization”, but for regulation, which takes drug trafficking out of the hands of criminals. For example, as happens in the so-called cannabis experiment, where cannabis is legally supplied to coffee shops.

It is not the first time that Halsema has advocated a different drug policy. For example, in October 2022, at a conference on organized crime, she said that “the war on drugs is not working”. She also expressed the hope that countries will look at drug use differently and that an “alternative strategy” will have to be formulated.

At the beginning of this month, the mayor warned in an opinion piece in the British newspaper ‘The Guardian’ that the Netherlands is at risk of becoming a narco-state. “The rise of the global drug trade means we need international solutions,” Halsema wrote.

In ‘FD’ she said on Thursday that there is a market for stimulants and that hundreds of years of discouragement and repression have achieved “damn little”. “About 80 percent of our police capacity is spent on drug-related crime. In the Netherlands and Belgium, street prices for coke have been exactly the same for years. So you can only conclude that the incredible amount of effort has no effect on the market.”

According to Halsema, it is better to overthrow the criminals’ revenue model instead of repression. “I am part of a growing group of scientists and administrators who say that the international war on drugs has such perverse effects that we are now suffering more from it than from the drugs themselves.”