The Netherlands Drug Situation 2010 - Trimbos-instituut

Research on organised crime shows that criminals involved in transit crime need to cooperatewith persons they can trust. Therefore, they prefer to co-operate with personswho are well known to them, thanks to family and friendship ties (Van de Bunt et al.2007).The impression sketched by the Police Forces can be summarized as follows: With regards to cannabis, there is expertise on regional level, but not yet on nationallevel. The regional investigations focus mainly on production and the distributivetrade. The investigations also aim at the financial aspect of a case. Growshops play adominant role in this distributive trade. They are a place where producers and buyersof cannabis meet each other. Sometimes they serve as a stash for the cannabis. Theshops can be a legal façade for an illigal organization. The trafficking of Dutch cannabisand hash from abroad is often in the hand of the same entrepreneur. Dutch criminalsseem to expand their territory to Belgium and Germany, according to the police.How much of the cannabis is exported, is not known. Most of the arrestees for cannabisoffences are Dutch and for a larger part well known to the police already. With regards to cocaine, it is reported that the trafficking of cocaine to Europe is laboriousand a transport may take months or even years. Western Africa still is a logisticjunction in the international trafficking of cocaine, but South-Africa is also becoming arelevant meeting point for cocaine-related organised crime. Different nationalities,like Colombians, Italians, British and Dutch persons, are in different ways involved inthe trafficking. With regards to heroin the police reports that most of the seized heroin comes fromAfghanistan and is mainly imported from Turkey. It is coming into the Netherlands viathe German border by road transports. The Netherlands still is a logistic junction anda distribution centre for heroin and adulterants for the (Western) European market..Newis the emergence of Belgium in the same role. New is that the heroine marketin the Netherlands is ‘dutchifying’ and that traffickers of heroin often deal in morethan one type of drugs. With regards to synthetic drugs, there is additional information available from theCentre of Expertise on Synthetic Drugs and Precursors (KLPD 2010b). This Centrecollects data about investigations in the Netherlands and abroad, it uses medias cansand reports from other organizations. The reports from the National Police Forces andfrom the Centre of Expertise both indicate some displacements in the supply of syntheticdrugs:o Firstly, there is a displacement in precursors: there seems to be an increasing scarcityof the precursor PMK, which made producers of MDMA turn to the preprecursorsafrol. BMK seems to be sufficiently available for producers of amphetamine;it might come from Russia or Lithuania, but producers might also be lookingfor alternatives like BMK-sulphite or phenyl acetic acid. The scarcity of PMK in 2009led to a decrease of the production of MDMA.o Secondly, diverse other kinds of synthetic drugs were seized (in various amounts).o Thirdly, there are indications that persons with other ethnic backgrounds are increasinglyinvolved in production and trafficking, in addition to the criminal entrepreneursthat are already known in this field and who have a structural position inthe production of synthetic drugs.o Finally, the production is spreading to more countries. Belgium still plays an essentialrole in the logistic process, via the harbour of Antwerp. Production sites in theNetherlands were mainly found in the south of the country and their capacity andprofessionalism increased, like in 2008.146