Rochelle Villani

The four main speakers at drug debate at De Balie. From left: Sofyan Mbarki, Nellie Benner, Rein van Leeuwen and Machteld Busz. 

AMSTERDAM – In an attempt to discuss the responsibility of and solutions for drug related issues in Amsterdam, a debate on hard drugs at De Balie missed a clear take-home message.

Over 80 percent of the audience raised their green voter’s card when they were asked if they thought that drug users were partly responsible for the violent crimes that took place for their drug to exist. At Amsterdam University College (AUC), a recent online poll matches this occurrence – out of the 76 students that voted, 61 argue that this responsibility partly lies with the user too.

The debate was organized in reaction to an alarming study by professor Pieter Tops and journalist Jan Tromp on the high rate of drug related crime in Amsterdam that was released in September. On Friday night 11 October, over 70 persons attended the sold-out debate. The audience’s ages were in between 20 and 50 years and half of the audience had used hard drugs before.

Lies de Haan, a 20-year-old medicine student at the Universtiy of Amsterdam, said that few solid solutions were discussed by the main speakers and the ones that they mentioned were refuted, often by main speaker Sofyan Mbarki, chairman of PvdA Amsterdam.

Machteld Busz, founder of the Poppi Drugs Museum and one of the main speakers during the debate, said that a good conversation between different Dutch authorities is necessary to find a fitting solution in order to tackle the international drug trade system, instead of pointing the finger at the ‘responsible’ users.

But “In Amsterdam we live in a progressive bubble, while the rest of the country is rather conservative still” said Mbarki. He argued that conservative politicians would never discuss risky topics like hard drugs.

Nowadays, snorting and swallowing drugs has become a common thing to do in Amsterdam. Seemingly in favor to repress this standardization of hard drugs, Mbarki said that in order to make the users’ responsibility tangible, hard drug buyers should get prosecuted if they bought from someone younger than eighteen years old, converting the moral responsibility into a legal responsibility.

Busz said that the government ban on hard drugs created this violent drug system, further illegalization of the system is not an option.

The other two main speakers at the debate were Nellie Benner and Rein Van Leeuwen from Drugslab, an educative YouTube channel from the BNN Vara in which both try all kinds of drugs to inform its viewers on the effects. Marijn Schrijver, a journalist specialized in drug related crime in Amsterdam introduced the event. Over the past years, many crimes – several liquidates, shootings and even a beheading – took place in Amsterdam due to “The war of drugs”, as Schrijver called it to set the tone.

Near the end of the debate, Mbarki said “We are all on the same line”. To take advantage of the setting, Benner joked “A line of coke?” and the audience laughed.

In a way, the joke symbolizes the debate – an attempt to harmoniously combine and conclude on very different and complex points within 1.5 hours was beyond reach.