It is an illusion to think that the legalization of drugs in the Netherlands will lead to less drug crime. That is what Professor of Undermining Pieter Tops, affiliated with Leiden University and the Police Academy, says at WNL.
Illusion
Legalizing drugs is not going to work, says Pieter Tops in the WNL radio program Het Misdaadbureau: “If you only do this in the Netherlands, it is really an illusion that it will lead to a reduction or disappearance of drug crime.”
Attractive
According to Tops, this has two main reasons: ‘If we only do that in the Netherlands, the Netherlands will become even more the center of the international drug world than it is now. Because the Netherlands then becomes an attractive country for people from other countries to come to.’
In addition, according to Tops, it is a utopia to think that if drugs are legalized, the criminals will also give up: “There are always opportunities to evade the legalized system,” he tells WNL. ‘For example, by producing cheaper or by producing more products with other active ingredients. The legalized system will have a very difficult task to cope with that.’
Condition
Tops’ position is that legalization does not lead to a reduction in crime. It is rather the other way around: ‘Reducing drug crime is a precondition for organizing a legalized system in the Netherlands at all.’
A colleague of Tops, criminologist Cyrille Fijnaut, previously argued for the legalization of cannabis in a European context, in order to reduce drug crime. He argues that strict action must then be taken against a black market.
