Drug smuggler nation

Narcotics and the Netherlands, 1920–1995

Stephen Snelders

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526151391
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526151384
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Why did the international drug regulatory regime of the twentieth century fail to stop an explosive increase in trade and consumption of illegal drugs? This study investigates the histories of smugglers and criminal entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who succeeded in turning the country into the so-called 'Colombia of Europe' or, 'the international drug supermarket'.

Increasing state regulations and interventions led to the proliferation of a 'hydra' of small, anarchic groups and networks ideally suited to circumvent the enforcement of regulation. Networks of smugglers and suppliers of heroin, cocaine, cannabis, XTC, and other drugs were organized without a strict formal hierarchy and based on personal relations and cultural affinities rather than on institutional arrangements. These networks created a thriving underground industry of illegal synthetic drug laboratories and indoor cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands itself. Their operations were made possible and developed because of the deep historical social and cultural 'embeddedness' of criminal anarchy in Dutch society.

Using examples from the rich history of drug smuggling, Drug smuggler nation investigates the deeper and hidden grounds of the illegal drug trade, and its effects on our drug policies.

1
Introduction: The drug regulatory regime vs. criminal anarchy

Despite more than a century of increasing state regulation on a global scale, drug trafficking today is the most profitable illegal trade in the world. A conservative estimate valued the illicit drug retail market in Europe (including the UK) alone in 2013 at 24 billion euros. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), illegal drugs account for 17 to 25 per cent of all proceeds of global crime, and for between 0.1 and 0.6 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in member states of the European Union (including the UK).¹

In the Netherlands the contribution of illegal activities to the GDP has been estimated at 0.4 per cent or 2.6 billion euros. Half of this comes from the trade in illegal drugs. The export value of indoor cultivated nederwiet (‘Netherweed’ or Dutch marihuana) alone was estimated at 1 billion euros in 2010.² Today the country is one of the most important sources of synthetic drugs such as MDMA (XTC) and amphetamines and functions as a major transit hub for other drugs, for example of cocaine to the UK.³ A 2018 report on the Dutch production and export of synthetic drugs came to a staggering (but in the view of the report's authors still conservative) estimate of a global retail value of 18.9 billion euros.⁴

These estimates give some kind of indication of the economic value of the illegal drug trade, even when based on limited data provided by police detective units and only giving approximate indications of the total volume of the illegal drug trade. The estimates do not give an idea of other major impacts of the drug trade on society, such as cross-overs with and financing of other criminal activities, entanglements with the legitimate economy, corruption and threatening of civil servants, and effects on public and individual health. States and civil society are struggling with the unintended consequences of drug regulatory policies and the successes of the drug trade, such as problems of addiction, overdoses, and gang wars. Of crucial importance in coming to terms with these consequences is an understanding of the patterns and nature of the illegal drug trade.

The rise and implementation of an international drug regulatory regime in the twentieth century restricted and transformed the traditional Dutch production and trade in drugs. At the same time it created new opportunities for Dutch entrepreneurs. The increasing state regulations and interventions necessary to control the illegal drug trade and consumption, combined with the increasing public demand for these illegal drugs, led to the proliferation of a ‘hydra’ of small, anarchic groups and networks ideally suited to circumventing the enforcement of regulation. When one head of this hydra was chopped off, another one grew in its place. In the course of the twentieth century these groups and networks included sailor smugglers, idealists from countercultural drug scenes, and criminal opportunists. They included native Dutch people as well as criminal entrepreneurs from other ethnic backgrounds in the Netherlands (Chinese, Turkish, and Kurdish, Moroccan etc.). They were often working together in temporary alliances, and in tandem with a legitimate ‘upperworld’, especially within the chemical and maritime industries. Smugglers in the Netherlands used the excellent logistics and infrastructure of the country and its superb connections by ship, train, or plane to places of supply and demand, and stimulated the development of illegal drug production, from Afghanistan to Morocco. Smugglers transformed the Netherlands into a transit hub for the international drug trade, supplying other European countries and the UK. They developed direct and indirect connections between supply countries and demand in the Americas. They also created a thriving underground industry of illegal synthetic drug laboratories and indoor cannabis cultivation in the Netherlands itself.

The drug regulatory regime and the illegal drug market stimulated an enormous expansion of ‘organized crime’ that took the Netherlands by surprise. In 1974 the Rotterdam police commissioner Jan Blaauw warned of the existence of ‘organized crime groups’ that had partly developed out of smuggler networks. He estimated the total number of people involved at less than a hundred.⁵ Little more than fifteen years later the Centrale Recherche Informatiedienst (CRI – Criminal Intelligence Unit) of the Dutch police produced a list of more than 260 ‘drug gangs’, most of them also involved in other criminal activities such as armed robberies, car thefts, and possession of illegal firearms.⁶ By the year 2000 the American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimated that around one hundred criminal groups were active in the illegal drug trade in Amsterdam alone. Besides Dutch people these included Turkish, Colombian, Kurdish, Chinese, Nigerian, Israeli, Moroccan, British, and Irish groups.⁷ Blaauw's one hundred organized criminals had multiplied and were creating havoc in Dutch society. Concerns over these developments led to the widely publicized parliamentary inquiry of 1994–1996 that concluded that the illegal drug trade and organized crime had become firmly embedded in society.⁸

In order to understand the patterns in the rise of the illegal drug trade and its relation to organized crime, from the enactment of the first Dutch drug law in 1920 to the parliamentary and societal debates around 1995, this book synthesizes the results of case studies of and reports on twentieth-century illegal drug smuggling and production – works by historians, criminologists, and investigative journalists together with archival research. The (often bewildering) multiplications of the supply side of the market are investigated from the perspective of their emergence and development as the necessary antithesis to the creation and implementation of a drug regulatory regime by the state.

The global drug regulatory regime

The Dutch drug regulatory regime developed within the context of an international drug regulatory regime that was inaugurated by the International Opium Convention of 1912 and expanded in subsequent treaties. I use the term ‘regime’ here in the definition of historians Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, ‘to signify a system in which an authority declares its right to control certain practices, and develops policies and mechanisms to exercise that right within its presumed domain’.⁹ Although this book is not primarily concerned with the grounds and dynamics of this regime, a short overview of its development is in order.

The global drug regulatory regime worked from the international level (multilateral treaties between states and from 1919 onwards supervision by supra-national organizations, the League of Nations, and the United Nations) to the local level (legislation and policies of states) in order to control non-medical and recreational use of prohibited drugs. In doing so the regime created a reaction that went the other way: non-state actors such as criminal entrepreneurs and their networks started activities at the local level (e.g., cultures of smuggling in cities and provinces) and expanded internationally. This led to more global regulation and prohibition that led again to more opportunities for local entrepreneurs to expand their activities.

The twentieth century is the key period for understanding our present-day policies and problems of drug control. There is, however, a ‘pre-history’ of the regulation of drugs such as opium that goes back into the seventeenth century. For instance, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) tried to establish a monopoly on the opium trade on Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) as early as the 1670s. In 1678 the company prohibited the sale of crude opium not distributed from its own warehouses. A few years earlier, in 1674, the VOC had prohibited opium use among the agricultural workers on the Moluccas out of fears of a decrease in their productivity.¹⁰ Opium trade and consumption would become hotly contested in Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leading, for instance, to the infamous Opium Wars of 1839–1842 and 1856–1860 in which Britain and France forced China to open its borders for the opium trade. By the early twentieth century most colonial powers, including the Netherlands, had established monopolies on the distribution of opium in their colonies (for more detail on the Dutch opium monopoly, see Chapter 3).

Attempts at global drug regulation started in the early 1900s. The United States and China especially promoted the enactment of drug regulation in international law and international treaties. The meetings of the International Opium Commission in Shanghai in 1909 and the International Opium Conference in The Hague in the Netherlands in 1912 led to the first international opium convention. This convention was aimed at controlling the non-medical and ‘illegitimate’ use of opium and opiates derived from opium such as morphine and heroin, as well as of cocaine. (The latter three drugs were all relatively new substances that had been developed by the pharmaceutical industry in the nineteenth century.) The United States particularly became the driving force behind prohibitionist global drug regulation. As political scientist David Bewley-Taylor has written:

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States has been consistent in its intention to confront the issue of drug use from the prohibitionist perspective and locate the sources of domestic [drug] problems beyond the boundaries of American society […] the emergence of a universal norm dictating national responses to illicit drug use could emerge only given the influence possessed by a superpower [the United States].¹¹

Not all countries were at first enthusiastic about global drug regulation, since it ran counter to economic interests. These interests concerned, for instance, the colonial opium monopolies, the German and Dutch pharmaceutical industry, and the position of the Japanese as distributors of cocaine and morphine in Asia. The rise of the United States as a global superpower driving the expansion of a global regulatory regime was ther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The drug regulatory regime vs. criminal anarchy
• 2 The interwar period
• 3 Global perils I: Chinese and Greek drug smugglers
• 4 Cannabis, counterculture, and criminals: The rise of cannabis smuggling
• 5 Global perils II: Chinese triads, Turkish families, and heroin
• 6 The expansion of the cannabis trade after 1976
• 7 Global perils III: Colombian syndicates and cocaine
• 8 The floodgates of criminal anarchy: Synthetic drugs and subverting the state
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix: Graphs of arrests and seizures
• Bibliography
• Index