In the city of Antwerp, led by Bart De Wever, a conservative politician and usually guarantor of “law and order”, we are witnessing a wave of violence, with weapons, which the local police are unable to repress or Stop. The mayor, who mocked the municipality of Molenbeek for its inability to stop disorders of the same kind, is today to claim, him the Flemish nationalist, the help of the federal State and a meeting of the National Security Council. We doubt that he imagines that it could be used for anything, except to transfer the responsibility to someone else.
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In the city of Antwerp, led by Bart De Wever, a conservative politician and usually guarantor of “law and order”, we are witnessing a wave of violence, with weapons, which the local police are unable to repress or Stop. The mayor, who mocked the municipality of Molenbeek for its inability to stop disorders of the same kind, is today to claim, him the Flemish nationalist, the help of the federal State and a meeting of the National Security Council. We doubt that he imagines that it could be used for anything, except to transfer the responsibility to someone else. All this violence is linked to the fight, which we know has been lost for a long time, of the authorities against drugs. Repressive laws punish very heavily those who sell or transport it, and also target, albeit less severely, those who are content to consume it. The problem is there and not, as Bart De Wever asserts, in the migration policy, whose relationship with drug trafficking and consumption is difficult to see. Basically, the problem is that hundreds of thousands of people are forced into hiding because they occasionally consume a joint or other substances. However, they do harm, if necessary, only to themselves. The American writer Lysander Spooner said it already 150 years ago: “vices are not crimes”. This is why the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1930s was a failure which only increased crime. The United States and other countries then replicated this drug system globally. With the same result: everywhere, violence is exacerbated between traffickers and their business partners, and consumers find themselves forced to buy from unsavory people they would never have known in the absence of prohibition. . Hence the risks in terms of the quality of the product and the inclusion of an entire population in a clandestine system made up of black money, various trafficking and violence. Banning the drug only increases the profits of the traffickers. It is well known: selling an illicit product brings in much more. This is the significantly higher “risk reward” than for an ordinary trader. And who says high profit says recourse to all means to obtain it, alas. Hence the existence of mafias and huge transcontinental criminal networks against which the States, despite gigantic means, are powerless, and a crime that extends to many other areas, including crimes of blood, the extortion, and money laundering. You have to realize that all of this wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the indiscriminate and blanket drug prohibition system. This has no other effect than to multiply the security expenditure of the State, and to increase the profits of the traffickers. The enormous budgets which are currently devoted to repression do not in reality lead to any result, neither in Belgium nor elsewhere. The drug remains accessible to almost anyone who wants it. This system does not even protect public health since, on the contrary, it gives rise to products that are even more dangerous than those that we wanted to ban. Serious thought should be given to challenging this widespread repression. The considerable sums devoted to it, in vain, could be much better used by helping those who are the victims of this traffic, part of the consumers. It will not be disputed that medical care would be much more effective in this respect than prison, which is and remains the best school for crime.
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