‘In time, drug legalisation is inevitable’

“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong,” quipped the American writer HL Mencken.

Is drug liberalisation proving his point?

It promised to solve the failed war on drugs — by putting illegal gangs out of business, freeing up police time, and allowing medical help for users. But practice is messier than theory.

New York has made such a hash of legalising cannabis that illegal vendors far exceed legal ones. In April, Oregon reversed the decriminalisation of hard drugs after overdoses spiralled (although the causal link is debated). British Columbia has faced similar issues.

Amsterdam has been grappling with the unwanted results of permissiveness for much longer. The world’s most liberal city has become one of the most visited: nearly 10mn tourists stayed there last year, above the pre-Covid peak. It is the city where everything goes and everyone goes. Many foreigners are drawn by cannabis and sex shows; some locals despair at the tawdriness.

The city’s mayor, Femke Halsema, is trying to clean up the excesses. In her office overlooking the Amstel river, she calls for more visitors “who love the canals”, rather than “urinate in them”.

But she says the deeper problem is less visible: the illegal market for cocaine is booming across Europe. In 2023, Dutch police intercepted record quantities but on the street cocaine prices remain low. “The only thing you can conclude [is] that there is more and more coming in and more and more money is made,” says Halsema, who begins her second, six-year term as mayor this week.

Amsterdam’s real problem is prohibition, she argues, and the answer is not less liberalisation, but more. She wants to end the Netherlands’ halfway policy on cannabis: coffee shops can sell it, but cannot buy it legally, meaning they have to buy from criminals. Other European countries have recently liberalised further.

The cocaine trade fuels problems, particularly in Amsterdam’s poor outskirts, where “we see many, many youngsters getting seduced into organised crime”. High-profile murders have been linked to the drugs trade. In the south of the country, police discovered a gang’s “torture chambers”.

Halsema is also worried that Amsterdam’s financial centre, including estate agents and lawyers, is being “knowingly infected” by criminal money. In January she warned, perhaps too bombastically, that the country risked becoming a “narco-state”.

“Everything starts with the legalisation of cannabis, and maybe the legalisation of MDMA,” she says. For cocaine, she doesn’t want “complete legalisation” — given the health risks of crack — but “a medical model”, where the drug is perhaps available only at pharmacies.

So it wouldn’t be easy to buy cocaine? “Well, it is very easy to buy cocaine. You can call someone and they deliver it to your home — not only in Amsterdam, everywhere.” Regulating drug supply is “the only way that you can do something about the health problems”.

Amsterdam has stood apart from the national political shift to the right, which led to a new government being sworn in this month. Geert Wilders’s anti-Islamic party, the PVV, finished first nationally but only fourth in the capital.

Still, legalisation is bold. Does Halsema think it will happen? “In time, drug legalisation is inevitable.” She does not accept that, if drugs are legalised, the illegal market will endure, or consumption will necessarily rise. Legalisation can, however, only happen with international agreement.

The point is to end the “hypocrisy” between alcohol and other drugs. At clubs in Amsterdam, “many youngsters use three, four, five, six shots of alcohol, and they end up in the hospital. It’s very dangerous — and everybody accepts it. You also have a lot of youngsters, who go to the clubs, use one pill of MDMA, and drink water for the rest of the night. I think they go home a little bit healthier than the ones who drank alcohol all night. This is a choice between bad and worse, but we all know how young people are.”

But hasn’t Amsterdam’s experience put off some would-be supporters of liberalisation, who don’t want their cities to end up overcrowded and tourist-infested? The capital, she insists, is “one of the safest cities in Europe”. Last year it recorded just 11 murders. It is home to the European headquarters of Uber and Netflix. “It’s not so bad becoming Amsterdam,” Halsema insists. But her own wrestles with tourism and nightlife show the difficulty of finding the right model of tolerance.

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A criminologist by training, Halsema was leader of the Dutch Greens and then a writer before being appointed the city’s first female mayor in 2018. She has governed as a centrist. “I think she’s more popular than when she started,” because she has proved less radical than some people feared, says Tim Wagemakers, a reporter at the newspaper Het Parool. Tim Verlaan, a historian at the University of Amsterdam, says: “She has been very much a law-and-order mayor.”

The city’s problems with tourism resemble those of Barcelona and Venice. Halsema has promised to rescue the centre for locals. Amsterdam has capped cruise ships and new hotels. “But still the amounts [of tourists] are rising. And I think it will continue as long as you can fly for €50 from Glasgow to Amsterdam.”

The solution can only come through EU policy on cheap flights and on internet platforms, she argues.

Amsterdam has strict limits on Airbnb and the city council, which the mayor chairs but does not control, has tried to change the mix of tourists: deterring stag parties and guided tours of sex worker windows, and reducing the opening hours in the red-light district. An online quiz tells would-be visitors: “It is forbidden to organise and participate in pub crawls.”

But Halsema is not optimistic. Banning stag parties is “very difficult.” Signs tell tourists they could be fined €100 for smoking marijuana in the street: in practice, the community police “warn people.”

Her own proposals included banning tourists from coffee shops to shrink the cannabis market and make it easier to regulate. But the council stopped her, saying it would push visitors to the illegal market. Such are the complexities.

The mayor’s most eye-catching plan is to move part of the red light district to a new, nondescript “erotic centre”, in the south of the city. This is an attempt to make legalised prostitution safer and work better: today Halsema finds visiting the red light district “very difficult”, because of the way tourists “humiliate” sex workers standing in windows. She recalls a family taking a selfie in front of a woman in her underwear. “You’re not treating her as a human being. It makes me very angry.”

The erotic centre will be for those who want to pay sex workers; 100 of the red light district’s 247 windows are due to move there. “We are going to build it,” she says, tapping the wooden table in front of her as a precaution.

But the erotic centre faces possible legal challenges from residents, who don’t want to live next door to “the biggest brothel in Europe”, and from sex workers, who don’t want to leave the red light district. It won’t open until 2031 at the earliest — after Halsema’s second term ends.

“A city is an organism that changes slowly. The red light district has been there for centuries, it would be naive [to think] you can change it in five years. But I think the public debate on tourism has changed, the public debate on what is acceptable is changing.”

The Netherlands’ drug policy may be changing, too. A trial scheme will allow some cities to produce cannabis legally, although the national government blocked Amsterdam from taking part.

Halsema’s pro-legalisation stance is unusual for an incumbent politician. “I know the debate is dominated by former heads of states, former governors, former police officers. Everybody who leaves office changes their mind. And I thought I’m not going to wait until I leave office.” In fact, her mind has long been made up: she has backed regulation of drugs since the 1990s.

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October 7 changed Halsema’s priorities. Suddenly, she had to keep the peace amid rising antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Amsterdam, the city where Anne Frank hid, had more than 70,000 Jews before the second world war. Its complicity with Nazi crimes has not been acknowledged, says Halsema. “We treated ourselves as being heroes — as if we were all in the resistance, when we weren’t.”

In recent conversations, she has been shocked by how much inherited trauma even young Jews have. Last week, the word “Gaza” was sprayed on a statue of Frank: a “really painful” incident.

Meanwhile, the city’s large Muslim population is “traumatised” by the treatment of Palestinians and the rise of the PVV.

Halsema has tried “to strengthen the local identity, next to the national identity”. Many young Muslims feel “more like an Amsterdammer than a Dutch person. They do feel that, although they are not welcome in the Netherlands, they still have a place in Amsterdam.”

The right’s success in the Netherlands is a sign of how much of the public remains hostile to socially liberal policies, and a warning that it will not be easy to legalise drugs. “Most people in the Netherlands are afraid of drugs,” admits Halsema. “So they say: we make it criminal. If you studied crime, you know that making something illegal doesn’t mean it stops existing.”

The experience of the US states shows that, even when opinion favours tolerance, it can quickly flip back. “I’m not naive. There will be a backlash. It will take you years and years to create a legal market that’s also well organised. If you look at Thailand, where they legalised cannabis but they didn’t create any regulation — they just threw it on the market and said everyone can produce and traffic cannabis — it became chaos!” The country is now planning to recriminalise it. “If you want to regulate drugs, you have to do it slowly.”