Drug smuggler nation by Stephen Snelders

Author:Stephen Snelders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manchester University Press

6

The expansion of the cannabis trade after 1976

Illegal cannabis use increased enormously in the Netherlands from the mid-1960s onwards, as we have seen in Chapter 4. Strategies of the state notwithstanding, a thriving Dutch international trade in cannabis had come into existence by the mid-1970s, supplying the Netherlands as well as other countries. This successful supply made further increase of demand possible. In response to this increase, the strategies of the Dutch state shifted. The country changed from a staunch upholder of the international regime of drug prohibition into an international idiosyncrasy. The 1976 revision of the Opium Act decriminalized individual possession of small amounts of cannabis of up to 30 grams for personal use. Though legally still a civil offence punishable with a sentence of up to one month in prison, in practice possession for own use has since been tolerated. At the same time, however, Dutch policymakers left the supply side of the cannabis market unregulated. The new regulatory regime of 1976 had unintended consequences, such as the tolerated concentration of retail in the so-called ‘coffee shops’ and their expansive growth in the 1980s, and the cultural transformation of cannabis use as an act of resistance into an act of everyday consumption.

Even before the liberalization of Dutch cannabis policies in 1976, smuggling cultures and networks had been expanding. After 1976 the demand for cannabis continued to grow in a political climate of liberal attitudes to consumption of the drug. These liberal attitudes did not encompass the production, smuggling, and wholesale distribution of cannabis. By the end of the 1980s police attention increasingly directed its focus at the supply side of the cannabis market. Nevertheless, more and more traders and smugglers of various nationalities and ethnic backgrounds observed and took their chance to enter the cannabis market. While the supply side of the market came to be dominated by entrepreneurs with a criminal background, idealism did not disappear completely. The influence of the Sixties counterculture was paramount in the development of extensive Dutch indoor cultivation of marihuana, the so-called nederwiet, although criminal entrepreneurs quickly entered this cultivation as well.

By 1995 the Netherlands was considered the most important country in the European distribution of cannabis.1 In that year one report estimated the annual value of the import of cannabis in the Netherlands at 2.2 billion Dutch guilders (at the time 1.2 billion US dollars). By comparison, the value of the consumption of tobacco in the Netherlands in 1993 was 4.9 billion guilders, with alcohol worth 5.1 billion guilders, and coffee 1 billion. The value of the cannabis trade had become greater than that of the coffee trade, despite the widespread everyday use of coffee in the country. Smugglers had contributed decisively to the normalization or naturalization of cannabis use and trade in Dutch society. The cultivation of nederwiet had developed into a successful export industry, estimated at 1.8 billion guilders (1 billion US dollars) in 1995. In addition the turnover of the transit trade of cannabis from other supply countries through the Netherlands was estimated at 3.

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