National Threat Assessment 2008. Organised Crime - Politie

The retail trade takes care of direct sales to users (sometimes via straw men)
at home addresses, in squats or pubs and clubs, via fast delivery service (for
example, by taxi drivers or cocaine deliverymen on scooters or mopeds), or on
the streets. The ‘lowest’ level of retail trade is formed by the activities of drug
users in what is called ‘wheeling and dealing’ (drug users trading amongst
themselves) and so-called ‘runners’, in other words, users who – in exchange
for small amounts of drugs – take other drug users to addresses or buy drugs
at addresses for other users.
The purity of the cocaine and the prices charged on these different markets vary.
Drug traders are not automatically limited to particular weights. Traders who
trade in kilograms may sometimes also be active on the ‘grams market’.
Somebody who, for example, successfully smuggles a kilogram of cocaine past
Customs may then divide it into smaller portions and sell it on. In that case one
person combines the roles of importer, distributive trader and retail trader.
In recent years new solvents and adulterants such as dimethylformamide and
boric acid have been used. Cocaine washing facilities have also emerged as a
new phenomenon in the Netherlands. In these washing facilities the cocaine
is extracted from the materials and/or substances that are impregnated with
cocaine. A total of 6 cocaine washing facilities were found in the first nine
months of 2007. In the past two years 8 cocaine laboratories have been
dismantled in the Netherlands. These laboratories were found to be increasing
in size (from living‐room size up to factory size). Increasingly, the impregnated
cocaine is masked by metal salts in order to prevent the standard microchemical
tests from showing a blue colour (i.e. positive for cocaine).
2.2.3 Scale
Not much can be said with certainty about the exact scale of the cocaine trade
and cocaine smuggling in the Netherlands. There are, however, two indicators.
First of all, there is the number of cocaine users in the Netherlands and secondly
there is the amount of cocaine seized. There are, however, a couple of snags.
To be able to estimate the overall use of cocaine in the Netherlands, the average
use per individual has to be known, but individual use varies so widely that a
reliable average cannot be calculated. The snag with the amount of cocaine seized
is that we do not know what percentage this amount is of the total amount of
cocaine smuggled into the Netherlands. Sometimes 10% is mentioned, but other
publications say the amount is closer to 50%. Furthermore, the amount of cocaine
seized has wholesale purity levels, whereas for retail and street trade the imported
cocaine is adulterated to various purity levels, which proportionally increases the
number of kilograms that enter the market. Nevertheless, we will focus on the
demand and seizures in the Netherlands in the following sections.
chapter 2 – Illegal markets
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