Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema has acknowledged that: “the sale and use of cocaine and different medicine ought to not be a punishable offence”, in an article printed on Thursday, January 25.
This controversial assertion is from an interview within the Financieele Dagblad (FD), and in accordance with the Mayor the struggle towards medicine is “perverse and counterproductive.”
As an alternative, she proposes that drug markets be regulated to undermine the income mannequin of “unscrupulous criminals.”
Her phrases have triggered fairly a stir, a lot in order that her spokesperson launched a press release confirming that: “Halsema doesn’t advocate for the rash legalisation of cocaine, however for regulating the drug.” The spokesperson additionally famous that is already occurring within the Dutch authorities’s hashish cultivation pilot challenge, the place hashish is legally provided to coffeeshops.
It’s not the primary time that Halsema has advocated for a brand new method to drug coverage. For instance, throughout a convention on organised crime in October 2022, she mentioned that “the conflict on medicine shouldn’t be working.” She additionally expressed the hope that international locations would take into account drug use otherwise and that an “different technique” must be formulated.
Chief of Folks’s Celebration for Freedom and Democracy, Dilan Yesilgoz responded by declaring that she thinks “regulating the cocaine commerce is nonsense”, including that: “the Netherlands, as an essential transit nation for medicine, suffers enormously from organised crime and the way it has creeped its approach into different areas of life. We’re coping with main violent crimes; with journalists, judges and attorneys who’re threatened. That’s my precedence.”
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