This is an English translation. The original Dutch article is authoritative.
Since the end of the lockdown, the public domain has become busier again with tourists, day-trippers and nightlife crowds, with the street dealer guild also waking up in the shadows. With all the misery that entails.
Collaboration between the VLOS (interest group for Smartshop owners) and Adviesburo Drugs has resulted in the above poster campaign to warn against the practices of street dealers. The campaign is being rolled out nationally via smartshops, as this street dealer problem occurs in all cities in the Netherlands, despite differences in nature and scale (especially in cities without coffeeshops).
And while we are talking about coffeeshops, we express our great concern regarding the intention of a growing number of cities in the country to introduce the I-criterion for coffeeshops. While more and more cities in the country have stopped using this criterion in recent years, the VVD faction in Amsterdam still wants to reintroduce it without realising what they are inviting upon themselves (see several articles on this website with substantive objections to this criterion).
Street dealing circuit ready
The latest information from the field received by Adviesburo Drugs is that the Amsterdam street dealing circuit is already anticipating a possible introduction of the criterion, such as stockpiling hash and cannabis, "bad" XTC tablets, cut cocaine and speed, through to inferior types of designer drugs! Experience simply shows that dealing systems that are volatile in nature (such as the street dealing circuit where the customer has no possibility to check the merchandise) are responsible for the supply of the most contaminated substances. The IGNORE STREETDEALER CAMPAIGN (2014/2015), warning about a street dealer who sold white heroin under the name of cocaine, resulting in three deaths and 14 near-deaths, is a most extreme example of this.
In short, there is every reason for any municipality to refrain from introducing the I-criterion.
August de Loor, 22 September 2020
_On behalf of the VLOS and Adviesburo Drugs_