In the TV series ‘The Wire’, one of the police majors creates an initiative in Baltimore city called Hamsterdam. Before the initiative, drug dealers in his district were operating on street corners where people lived, creating a lot of crime and violence in family neighborhoods.
Essentially what the major does is pick 3 zones in Baltimore where the houses are uninhabited, away from any shops or public areas. He puts police on the perimeters of these zones. He then tells the drug dealers that if they move to these zones and start selling drugs there, the police will not arrest them and will not arrest drug addicts for buying drugs there. On the contrary, while the police will ‘turn a blind eye’ to the drug-selling, they will be present to make sure there’s no violence. He instructs his police to ratchet up pressure on any drug dealers who do not move to ‘Hamsterdam’, arresting and releasing them multiple times a day. Because this brings all the drug dealers and drug addicts together in the same place, the major then brings in health charities to distribute clean needles, condoms, HIV tests and medical advice to people like drug addicts and young drug dealers who are otherwise very transitory and difficult to reach.
The initiative results in violent crime dropping massively, because police are constantly present around the drug dealers; it increases the number of high-risk people like drug addicts getting clean needles, medical advice, tests and condoms; it completely ‘cleans up’ neighborhoods that had been hell-holes before because of drug dealing; and it frees up police time that would otherwise be spent making arrests for minor drug offences, which are often fairly futile.
I’m sure it wouldn’t it work in real life. But what are the reasons it wouldn’t?
Off hand , I would say that it would have to work in concert with state and federal law enforcement agencies and oversight departments, even if the mayor decides that he is not going to waste time on drug enforcement, I cant see the DEA just twiddlling their thumbs.
Can you be more specific about what “working” means in this context?
Declan’s response is why it wouldn’t work due to government issues, but there are other senses of what you might mean, such as whether dealers would comply, whether it would make people safer, etc.
One problem I see is that I can’t think of any part of any city where there aren’t shops or people. “Not in my backyard” would kill it dead. Even an absentee landlord with vacant buildings would protest this kind of thing.
Sounds very much like the “Needle Park” idea which was tried in Zurich in the 1980s and failed.
IMO ideas based on “turning a blind eye” will never work, the essential economics and culture of the drug business will not change. You’ll notice in the link above the when “Needle Park” was shutdown it was replaced with a system of heroin prescription which has reduced deaths and HIV infection (and means that Switzerland is the only country in the western world that does not fund the Taliban, as their addicts get legally produced Opium-derivatives, not illegally grown opium from Afghanistan).
One problem is the supply chain (e.g. even in Holland the Dope Cafes can sell weed, but can have problems getting and taking delivery of large legal supplies for their own stock). So if it is OK to sell heroin in these areas, why isnt it Ok to import it? Where in the chain does one turn a blind eye?
Addicts must go to a doctor and get a prescription. They then I believe (its hard not clear from the press coverage) must use it in a medically supervised “injection room”.
I’m sure some is still used on the street. But of all the problems of drug addiction, the visible blight of junkies on the street is the least. The main problem is the crime that goes with paying for and dealing drugs. Its better to have junkies get their drugs from a doctor, (rather than commit crimes in order pay a criminal organization) irregardless of where they then choose to take them.
Those are all valid reasons for Switzerland to pursue a policy of treatment instead of punishment. I just really think that there are a lot of users that get their fix not from the doctor but from a dealer. I would be interested in knowing instead of guessing. I am not trying to be snarky. I just think that most of the heroin used in Switzerland is not from the government programs.
I agree. How could one get hooked if they had to get a prescription for it in the first place? Do you go to the doctor and tell him/her you want to try some heroin? Who wants to get high in a sterile room anyway? The whole point is to be out partying and feeling good isn’t it. By the time your willing to shoot up in the doctors office, your in bad shape.
it kind of works, but kind of doesn’t. For one thing, the press finds out about it and the whole thing blows up. Also, the drug dealers just can’t behave and there is violence in the zone. I think the series also makes it clear that approach means society is essentially giving up on a large section of society. There’s a scene where Bubbles is walking through Hamsterdam and it is a kind of hell on earth.
Right, we’d be giving up on that part of society, and it’s not like their problems would stop at the boundaries of the drug neighborhood. They’ve got other needs besides the drugs, but they’re not really set up to deal with any of it in any good way.
On the whole, I think the plusses and minuses of such a set up would be a net plus, but there’d be huge minuses to match the large plusses.
I think he’s saying that the entire city might be a +1 per person, but the Hamsterdam area would be a -100 per person. That’s probably what you thought.
Actually it worked well in the series - it had the positives I described: massive drop in violent crime, health workers getting better access to high-risk groups of people, cleans up all the other drug-ridden neighborhoods, frees up police time. The only reason it falls apart in the series is because the press gets wind of it and explodes with outraged reports about how, ‘police legalize drugs and create a hell hole!’, ignoring any of the positives, because it’s a good story (as they would in real life, I suppose).
There is some violence in the tolerance zone, but much less than there had been in all the non-tolerance zones before, so overall violent crime was way down, and the only victims of that violent crime were those who’d explicitly chosen to get involved in the drug zones, no innocent residents.
And it’s true that the place looks like hell on earth when Bubbles walks through it, but the scenes they show of the other drug corners before Hamsterdam was set up were nearly as bad, with the added negative that those neighborhoods had innocent people living in them. Hamsterdam may have been hell on earth, but no one lived there and you had to actively choose to go in.
There will always be someone willing to distribute more discreetly in the market vacuum created by moving the dealers into The Zone. I wouldn’t imagine the majority of users would want to get high outside of their own homes, let alone want to travel to a nasty place to get their junk.
Huge investment in the real estate, huge bureaucracy to police and maintain, and still there will be a smarter, sneakier dealer filling in the vacuum in the neighborhoods rescued by the system. I’m an optimist by nature, but this would fail miserably. Within a week there’d be nobody in Hamsterdam except cops and a few retarded (and broke) dealers.
