Ten years ago, the drinking age went from sixteen to eighteen. But according to Nick Willems, owner of party café Mambo’s in Handel, ‘NIX18’ was not a good move. “Alcohol is almost impossible to get for young people anymore, so getting tired in the pub is no longer an option. So now they turn to those drugs. What have we achieved? I think it’s a drug problem.” Omroep Brabant asked young people about their drug use.
Nick has been running party café Mambo’s for about ten years, where for years they organized clubbing evenings where people from the age of sixteen were welcome. To order alcohol you needed an 18+ wristband. But since the corona crisis, Nick has seen more and more drug use among minors in his pub and that is why they recently decided to stop the night out for sixteen and seventeen year olds.
“You notice it in the sales. If you look at the popularity of the drinks, the calculation is not that difficult.” They sold little beer and mixed drinks, but mainly soft drinks, bottled water and energy drinks. “We also see it in the behavior and the number of incidents. Think of people we catch with drugs and the number of denials we issue.”
According to Nick, there is a drug problem. Particularly since the corona crisis, but according to him this is also partly due to the fact that minors can no longer order alcohol in the pub. “What we see a lot is designer drugs, because they are not on the Opium List and are simply sold on the internet. When we talk to young people they say: ‘We are not doing anything wrong, this is allowed, isn’t it?'”
Popularity
How popular are drugs among young people? We asked more than 1,300 young people between the ages of 13 and 23 about their drug use. A third of them indicate that they use soft drugs. Think of cannabis and laughing gas. 85% of them say they started doing this before they were eighteen.
The use of hard drugs among young people in Brabant is lower: 16% of young people say they use hard drugs, such as coke or ecstasy. Half of young people who use hard drugs say they started doing so before they turned eighteen.
We also asked the young people whether their parents think it’s okay for them to use drugs. 22% of young people who indicate that they use soft drugs say that their parents think it’s okay. More than half of them do it secretly. For hard drugs, 60% say they use them secretly and 16% indicate that their parents think it’s okay for them to use hard drugs.
Miauw
According to Nick, more and more young people are using designer drugs. These are drugs that have been specially created to mimic the effect of another existing drug that is banned. Drugs on the Opium List are banned in the Netherlands, but by adding another substance, many designer drugs are not (yet) banned.
A well-known designer drug is Meauw. That drug is banned each time, but is then replaced by a similar drug with a slightly different composition. And it is not yet on the Opium List. The drug is therefore easy to order online. 14% of young people indicate that they use meow. A large proportion of them (71%) say their parents do not know they are doing this.
What is striking about the results is that a large proportion of young people who use drugs say they started doing so before the age of eighteen. The difficulty in obtaining alcohol and the cost of a drink in the pub, as Nick expects, could contribute to this.
Omroep Brabant investigated went on a pub crawl with minors to see if they could get a beer. You can see that in this HOW..?