“Why is coke so fucking expensive?” I’ve sung along to this question from Goldband’s hit song ‘Witte Was’ so many times, that I googled the answer. Turns out there’s a global chain of modern slavery, gang violence, child labour, environmental destruction, corruption, and misdemeanors behind cocaine!
I think it would be good to bring this to the attention of the public a little more broadly. Because more and more people are concerned about appalling conditions in clothing factories and livestock sheds. They buy more sustainable clothing and meat substitutes. Fly less for the environment. If they hear about that deadly chain, maybe they snort less?
The government had already figured it out. The justice minister said in 2018 that coke users are financing “serious crime and liquidations”. The Municipality of Amsterdam and the police also want to make drug users aware of the social consequences. When they shared that intention, Peter R. de Vries was still alive.
But wait, I read in a recent piece of NRC that all those campaigns came to nothing. The journalist makes a round of calls and hears that the police wanted to launch a fictitious label for ‘liquidation-free cocaine’ (just kidding, because that doesn’t exist of course). Not done anyway, because the usefulness of addressing is not considered great.
The police are probably right about that. I came while Googling Goldband The Cocaine Trail against, a television program from 2020. Broadcaster PowNed put six millennial coke users on a plane to Colombia to see for themselves where their favorite stimulant comes from. For six episodes, they sob in front of inmates forced into drug smuggling and traumatized victims of violence. But, I read in a later interview with four of the participants: they continue sniffing. Even though one believes there is now “blood sticking to the user’s hands.”
Another reason the police don’t campaign: it’s such a big international problem; if the Dutch don’t sniff, the impact is minimal. True, but the same applies to the clothing industry, intensive livestock farming and flying. Yet many consumers can no longer justify it for themselves. Why wouldn’t that be the case with coke?
Because there is no alternative, they say at the Trimbos Institute. The participants of The Cocaine Trail Also to. The ‘system’ is the problem. Decriminalize drugs. fair enough, but don’t pretend to be an activist if you keep sniffing the backs of modern slaves. Rather start a lobby group for fair trade coke if it is so close to your heart.
The State Secretary for Health came up with the most original argument not to campaign. “Only” 284,000 adults use cocaine. That is why it is ‘very difficult’ to reach just that group in a large-scale campaign. Funny, in the online age of targeted advertising.
No matter how hopeless or complicated a coke campaign may seem, it has to come. Do not mention that you are an end user in a chain where your sixteen-year-old neighbor and dealer the picking child on a Peruvian plantation belonging is not an option. Because then we have an untruthful discussion about the changes that are needed around drugs.
If the politicians don’t do it, then citizens. Which advertising agency sticks its nose into this? Perhaps Goldband would like to provide the soundtrack.
Ernst-Jan Pfauth writes a column here every other week.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of September 5, 2022