Our man in the Netherlands
offers us a balanced, well reasoned, cogent and genuinely thought provoking essay on the nature of the narcotics trade as it stands today, many many years after the War on Drugs was first declared. This piece is an example of real grown up Journalism in the best sense of that word (I know that word has become a near pejorative in the online age).I expect the comments section to be lively.
Enjoy.
TJB.
Our age has become the age where the drug war, started long ago, is coming to a crescendo. It is astounding how a tiny individual speck, an act of consumption one may regard as trivial or benign, can wreak havoc on the world. The violence is taking center stage. Especially here in the Netherlands, Belgium, France—the ports of Europe—this market is increasing its power.
Many politicians have failed to work this matter the way they should. In their defense: it is quite a challenge for the average politician to tackle—most of whom have presumably not ever even seen drugs in person. That is a fact them to be forgiven. But for their void promises to bring resolutions, I cannot bring myself to bear such empathetic sentiments. When they promise to rid us of drug violence—and crime, and gangs, so on—they do not deliver. They send out police, but have no idea on how (or where, rather) to use force as a useful tool, to create a meaningful transition. And when we employ force regardless, police will simply become a perpetual need; a dependency. An always inadequate measure to an insurmountable problem. This only results in more cost—economic and otherwise. Even if it were more effective than it is, we must be mad to keep pursuing it—or desperate.
But we are limited by what we can conceive. Our minds currently do not stretch much further than the violent urge to respond to the calamity with repression. Even if we have long lost a due sense of urgency, and have had plenty of time to think things over. To reconsider what we have been missing with our actions.
We are so used to the implicit assumption that drugs are bad, that they should be illegal, that no one even considers the obvious. I do not hear it being brought up in the news reports (enough). Only: more violence, more crime, thus more police. At some point, perhaps we should wonder if we ought to be thinking of making less of something rather than more. We’re looking for the crime, it almost seems, and our attitudes befit this.
Here is the thing: whatever we may say of it, the reason there is so much violence is because “drugs”1 are illegal. Criminalized. That is it. When the access to a good is restricted by law, and this is, by a policing power, enforced, we are hunted. We no longer need mere access to the product itself: one needs security. We have created a market that must wage war in order to exist. We should think about this more; repeat this! We should be echoing it in every related conversation and news report—if we ever intend to do something about it.
Because who is actually being served by this?2 The way it is now, I mean. People somehow have cultivated the implicit assumption that criminalization of drugs is good for the integrity of society, but fail to account for the harm it has done. About the suspicion that society will crumble and decay when drugs are made legal, I have very strong doubts. We’ll just have to see about that—and meanwhile there is very little to be said in defense of its validity.
For the opposite however—our tried and tested measure—we can see what mayhem we’re causing. The pressures exerted by the consequences of our current policies make our situation grave, and our waiting turns it all the more dire. I think it is not ill advice, for clarity, to count up the likelihood that criminalization will do society crumble and tear it apart, against the likelihood that regulated legalization will. What are we betting on? It is namely not like we were saved from the disasters of the private user, performing an inherently criminal and harmful act3 in consuming a drug. And if there are any dangers involved in it, they are very unlikely to be dangers that we, through criminalization, are saved from.4 We have probably created more irresponsible use by shoving the act into a climate of taboo, encapsulating the phenomenon in a criminal underworld. The tally for actual dangerous criminal activity, on the other hand, increased dramatically as the drug market has moved beyond the legal waters. So, we come to the situation wherein our law—precisely what is supposed to protect us from instability and dangers like these—is stripping away both the might and protections of the citizen, and instead fueling the growth and power of criminal organizations.
Don’t think of it backwards, as becomes so often the tendency in this simultaneity of encountering drugs and violence: drug violence exists and has grown out of hand because it is illegal, not the other way around. It has not been made illegal after crime gangs have grown—they only come in after, to serve a market no other has the ability or intent to serve. Consider: they actively fight against the only true legitimate agent of force that is around. That is what criminals are paid to do within the bounds of an illegal market with illicit products.
The sad unfortunate consequence is that this cyclically reinforces the outcomes of a bad start. The illegal status inspires the need for defense from authorities for the supplier. This comes at a greater strain and thus greater cost—not even to mention: lousy and dangerous product. And in the legal domain, we are taking the sign of growing crime around drugs as confirmation of our biases, as the evidence that this indeed is such a big problem and a despicable act.
But when we consider the dynamics of the market, we can see that what we see today is a very expectable outcome of the foundations we have erected not too long ago5. Very few6 are both willing and able to supply for this need of security around the product, and, so, only few do. And this also leaves those that do with an effective monopoly. They do not have much competition. And any remaining competition is not based (as in regular legal markets) on better product (quality of the drug itself), but is instead rooted in control over territory, domination tactics extraneous to law, and overall brute force.
Illegal status has morphed the core product from being the drug itself into a service that only a typical large criminally organized network can effectively provide. Drug crime has been made an unavoidable part of the business enterprise, due to its placement in a climate of lawlessness. Where anything goes, violence is soon found to be the ultimate competitive advantage, no matter how destructive the consequences. And we, the ordinary citizens, who do not feel compelled to change the underlying operating conditions, complain over the violence we see in the streets, while our law has created the exact milieu in which only it could grow. We planted apple trees and are now expecting oranges.
That crime in the streets, resulting from the way a criminal network effectively must do their business, of course contributes further to the abandonment and deterioration of the neighborhoods where they are most active. This halts the economic activity, and leaves whoever stays in the area to have lower economic prospects (leaving aside their compromised overall safety). Few with actual economic power will stay in such an area. It is unfortunate, but so it happens that young people (precisely with lower economic mobility), who are also growing up in an abandoned neighborhood where crime appears as the normal order of the environment, are left with the remainder of prospects: to work in the only machine with viable economic potential; the illegal drug company.
Because, all the while, we have done very little with our laws or enforcement to reduce the core demand of the market. If anything, unnecessarily creating various segments. Having low economic prospects (lowered prospects altogether) is also a reason7 to take to drugs, in order to cope with these pains and instabilities. Drug users, after all, must also remain not too far from their supplier if their use is habitual—and the supplier is only in few select (inhospitable) places, where it can more easily ward off the rest of society in its own deserted castle. It becomes like a feudal lordship. This only ingrains in that population a localized culture of use, through a physical, emotional, and economic dependency.
All of this stems from the simple admission that a supplier grows out of buyer’s demand. We have driven a nonetheless existent market, through all our restrictive efforts, toward limited outlets. The heavily strained transport of drug product, the need for security and territorial defense, the lack of regulated supply—the lack of alternative outlets of supply!—have conspired to create an artificial scarcity. This has inflated the price dramatically beyond what it should be. Add to that consideration an all-the-more appetizing sight of such a great and “easy” economic reward, within the environments that have very small and few opportunities to serve otherwise. Not so insensible, is it then, to turn over some easy hundreds or thousands in a single day?
That is how the cycle is again reinforced, attracting new players, whereby its the business grows. Slowly the criminal market overtakes a host area to which it can attach itself as a leech; where it becomes the regional product, like Camembert or Gouda. The market grows, economic structures are formed, and people become more reliant on this kind of business. And as the environment is changed by its presence, it remains to be the only viable economic organism that not only survives, but thrives in it. Illegal drug companies become an illicit arm of the total economy; a parasite turning regions into lawless abysses; a mirror of legal society.
What is needed to resolve this is not pure and blind force, because it will hit against a wall—like we can see. It’s fighting fire with fire. It lacks understanding of the underlying dynamics that helped create the problem. Because demand does not change, and people become only more reliant on illegal drug operations as their other options shrink. Being policed worsens that fact; needing security from government entities instead of being protected by them, taking to alternative organized powers, becoming reliant on the latter, without rights or courts. And over this kind of unbridled power more criminal conflict ensues. Regional stability and attractiveness decrease, reducing the opportunities alternative to the drug business, and so onad nauseam.
People need alternatives. Not be attacked, or harassed, into doing something. It won’t work, because there is no appeal to it. The buyer’s market is the first crucial population that should be acknowledged and embraced by the governmental bodies. It is a mistake to hunt the drug consumer. Forcing him out of the legal democratic domain has created a fragmented society, where another antithetical government takes hold to serve a scattered and discarded people.
Only then, after that acknowledgement, does it make sense to employ force—butcorrectly. Selectively. Realize that there is no less need for all other facets of life to be economically furnished in the areas that have become debilitated by drug operations. But who dares to go there? Besides the general lack of safety, there is too much risk in the promised yield. Any successful venture is apt to find itself to be taken, stripped from the environment—standing out as a blooming resource in a barren place. There protection is needed. Because where criminal law rules, violence is not out of the ordinary. Without the protection of police there, where it is useful, ordinary individual people can do nothing—because they do not specialize in force. What characterizes them as stable citizens is precisely that they have relinquished most forceful measures to their governing powers.
It is out of individuals that long-term stability can be restored: their businesses, their houses, their care for the neighborhoods and environments. They are the answer, the only answer. For them the conditions must be created to thrive, and thus they must be protected by their agent of force. All of this has been sucked out of drug environments, and attacking drug crime or its clientele directly will never replenish that.
We need to fight offense by defense here. We must use force, but to protect what we wish to preserve and create. Because no amount of attacking the opposite will itself come to create what we want to see. We should attack wisely, and recognize that the real asset in winning this drug war is the embrace of the consumer. Whoever does so best, will turn the tides in their favor.
A fairly general category, therefore a poor term. There are deliriants, stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens, whole, cut, organic, synthesized, smokable, drinkable, injectable—you name it. Man does not think alcohol the same as coffee, but we tend not to look at our habits—dare I say: addictions–that way: we regard their presence as self-evident, as the way to world works. We take them for granted, as a matter of course. We do not think twice of them—yet the same is not to be said for the habits and addictions that we do not directly experience the “fit” of, within the scope of our life, first-hand. Those we tend to misunderstand, prejudge, disregard, or worse: oppress.
Besides criminal organizations, that is.
Particularly in regards to others, as a concern of the law and force. We are not sure about the right way to place drugs in our society because we have insisted on keeping them out (bar a few, that is). But, besides this, I am not excluding the assertion that drug consumption in itself needn’t be harmful by definition and in principle either. That is largely determined by the application, as well as the context. And an illegal climate does not quite “foster,” in that, responsible use. It makes no place for it. It stigmatizes the act, deteriorates the quality of product, to name a few reasons.
I think some of the fears we have around drugs are partly legitimate, but they have not to do with the use of drugs in itself. But, rather, with a method or motive of using them. (To the non-user of a drug it may seem not so obvious, but plenty of drug use is not used as escapism). If anything, I suspect, we are here describing the existence of something that concerns us about our society: about a lack of structural integrity in some particular of its corners, where we prefer not traverse. We see a concerning sight in the debilitated junkie, and think the drug did that, but the drug is their answer—a poor solution—to a nevertheless prevailing problem. Our society does not entirely know how to handle or accommodate people facing certain conditions and circumstances. We have no answer for them, so they make their own.
In terms of societal morphology, that is, where half a century is usually what it has taken to truly reveal the effects of an architectural change.
That aren’t already part of a larger criminal “company.”
Importantly, reiterating it is by no means all.
The theory is good, but getting it to work correctly might be challenging… Any type of drug is dangerous and needs regulated for purity, dosing, etc., so people don’t die and sue. But that process gets expensive and complicated which gives rise to underground drug operations. So, still a market for an illegal/dangerous drug trade I think.
total and humane.