Arte documentary shows how Europe is being infiltrated by the drug mafia

Until recently, going to Amsterdam on the weekend to smoke weed was nothing unusual. The “coffee shops” had turned the Netherlands into a stoner’s paradise.

However, the dykes, canals, shipping and colonial goods trade had already made the Netherlands a global superpower for goods and drug trafficking in the early modern period. The trading company Dutch East India Company (VOC) is the first joint stock company in history and started business in opium in the 18th century.

This trade was officially taken over by the Dutch state in the 19th century, selling opium in state-owned companies – a kind of forerunner of coffee shops. In 1900, a factory was built in the middle of Amsterdam that produced cocaine as a pharmaceutical, which made the Netherlands the world market leader in cocaine during the First World War.

Than that Consequences of consumption and dependency bring more costs than benefits to the state, the drug trade is banned, with the effect that organized crime takes over the business.

The drug epidemic in European inner cities

The Arte documentary “Europe’s drug mafia. The wealth of a nation” tells of the origins and effects of this takeover, including well-known and lesser-known consequences such as the cocaine glut that affected Europe’s inner cities has created a drug epidemicand the murder of Dutch journalists like Peter R. de Vries, who reported on the mafia background.

That the Drug mafia in Europe Politics determines, there should be much more current political conversation. Just this week, 10 tons of cocaine were seized off Tenerife, one of the largest finds ever. An ARD focus on this would not have been exaggerated.