Could drug-tolerance zones like 'Hamsterdam' work in real life?

Factual Questions
21

Users have to travel to a nasty place to get their junk anyway - in fact, Hamsterdam would be a much nicer place to travel to than where they’re going at the moment, because firstly police presence means they’re much less likely to get beaten up, robbed or killed, and secondly there’s no chance of getting arrested.

There’s no investment in the real estate; in the series they use empty, disused housing areas. There’s no beaurocracy; in fact it saves the police on time and paperwork by not having to constantly make minor drug arrests. There might be dealers trying to set up in the old areas, but why would users go there and risk getting arrested or getting caught up in violence when they could go to the no-risk tolerance zone and not have to worry?

22

We’re on to you, Bunny Colvin!

23

Actually if you remember from the series Marlo Stanfield’s crew and the Barksdale organization continue to operate outside the free zone, and Marlo’s ascent as drug king pin in Baltimore is aided immensely because of all the corners that get freed up.

24

I’m still not seeing how, in real life, they could just use “empty, disused housing areas.” These properties are owned by someone, even if they are unoccupied. The owners would almost certainly protest the rezoning. An eminent domain case for this would make Kelo v. New London look like a walk in the park, and would still cost money.

Maybe there could be a rural version of this on tracts of federal land out west?

25

Actually, another major problem it helps with is the health of the addicts. As I understand it, most of the worst effects aren’t from heroin, but the kind of junk that the dealers cut it with; someone getting injected with heroin made by professionals in a nice clean lab cut with something medically harmless will live longer than someone injecting themselves with heroin cut with concrete dust.

26

No it wouldn’t work…I mean a lot of the associated crime from drugs has to do with junkies trying to get money for their next fix.

27

It seems to require a lot of cooperation among dealers and their suppliers, to share the turf. In real life, I wonder if this would lead to a gang war for the right to control the designated zone.

28

Think so, huh?

29

It wouldn’t work in real life because people are greedy.

I think the OP question isn’t about the larger aspects like “why is it OK in some places and not others.” That queston is somewhat analogous to dry countries versus wet counties.

The OP senerio wouldn’t work because first of all it’s illegal. This means that there is no outside “superior” control, like the police.

A lot of drug violence occurs simply because people want to make money and at the same time keep others from cutting into their shares. They do this by enforcing their “territory” so to speak. In franchises like McDonalds, you buy a McDonalds franchise and the contract says “You can’t build another McDonald’s within so many feet.” The law will back up this contract.

In a senerio like the OP proposed, even with an “Oral” contract, there is no one to enforce this, except the parties themseleves who would use violence. Even if you could establish an order between say 3 gangs. there is always a fourth or fifth party that will try to get in. And that means “Muscle in,” on someone else’s money.

Because it’s illegal a lot of “respectable” folk would say “So what if druggies kill each other who cares, that’s one less druggie.”

Even in the real world where illegal gangs work things out like “Gang A” does fencing, “Gang B” does protection, "Gang C’ does gun running, “Gang D does hard drugs,” “Gang E” does gambling and “Gang F does soft drugs” someone inevitably tries to break the order and a gang war breaks out till the pecking order is re-established.

30

Stop speculating people, and look at the practical results of such a pollicy as it has been tried out in the Netherlands for, oh, two decades now.

31

But isn’t that just the policy for marijuana and other ‘soft drugs’? Hamsterdam was mainly about heroin.

32

I have to agree that the show was much more ambivalent about the issue than the OP suggests: Hamsterdam was true hell, to a much higher degree than the corners had been before, and it was growing more hell-like by the day as the people in realized just how free they were.

33

Up to a point. Sale of marijuana is both “free” AND regulated, through our special marijuana cafe’s, “cofee shops”. But you are right, there is no equivalent for hard drugs. In fact, cofee shops lose their license if they are caugt selling hard drugs. However, untill very recently certain kinds of psychedelic drugs (mushrooms) were also sold in special shops. That is now outlawed.

However, part of the Dutch drug policy is that we hand out prescripted opiates to a selected group of chronic junkies. In the Netherlands, Bubbles would be in such a program. He would be expected to show up every day at the clinic, get a fix, and have a social worker allotted to him to get him back on track with subsidized housing and a subsidized job.

34

Yeah, opiates are among the safest of drugs if they’re pure and the dosage is known.

Hamsterdam seems like only a halfhearted solution to the drug problem. As long as drugs are impossible to acquire legally, the cost will be high, and that will mean users will be committing crimes to get money to pay for their addictions, and there will be other people willing to risk breaking the law for the potential profits.

35

An issue that really started bugging Carver.

And DID they ever get that old lady out of there? IIRC, they realized there WAS one old lady still living in the buildings and didn’t want to move anywhere.

36

Why would you pay to get bad heroin?

37

Also, at the beginning, they didn’t even try to get any kind of social services to the zone. It was the deacon (I believe he was played man upon whom Avon Barksdale was based) who told Bunny he had to do more for the zone.

The Wire usually avoided any kind of black and white statements, I thought they did a pretty could job of showing the cost of Hamsterdam.

38

I think Hamsterdam represented the only realistic ‘compromise’ that could occur in the US in these times. For sure Congress isn’t ready to legalise weed, let alone ‘harder’ drugs. So turning a blind eye was the only option open to Colvin.

But we cannot just ‘decriminalize’ hard drugs, that is giving up. Much better to ‘medicalize’ - turn Heroin addiction into an illness that has to be diagnosed and treated by medical professionals. Giving shots in clinics to addicts would get rid of many problems related to the distribution (violence, truancy and a bad feeling in
certain ‘hoods’) as well as problems stemming from purchase (theft and loitering).

If all the Heroin is free (in a clinic), no more heroin dealers and no more kids can get their hands on that shit.

The cost of funding a programme like this would be a fraction of the savings to taxpayers in the long run, crime would go down and the police would have more time to deal with crimes that hurt people more directly, like rape and murder.

If you smoke weed and fuck your life up, its usually just a problem for you, I don’t know any one whos robbed their mamas for a joint (I hope no one else has either) it does cause problems, but not on the same scale. So legalise, do it like Amsterdam or like cigarettes. Put a tax on it an watch the Billions pour in, it will more than pay for a medical heroin programme and help increase the number of police officers.

Ok. It’s not perfect, it won’t work with crack - short times between redosing would make it impractical to do in a clinical setting without effectively hospitalizing crack addicts permanently. And I know that crystal meth is causing some big problems, but I don’t know much about crystal meth since I don’t know any one whos done it - it sounds way too scary. Maybe a lot of crackheads would change over to heroin if it was free… maybe it could be sold in the pharmacies with cocaine and speed.

But its not going to happen. You might think I am a crazy for saying this, so go check Alfred W. McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin. He is a well respected professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he was the guy who exposed CIA complicity in the drug trade after visiting Vietnam.

He argues that our current policy is a failure. It plainly is and you must be blind not to see that ‘enforcement’ or ‘prohibition’ has failed for 50 years and will carry on failing miserably for another 50 unless we realise the error of our strategy, no tactical change will make a difference.

And ‘legalisation’ is politically impossible. So Mr McCoy advises us to take the third way to ‘regularisation’

In the states there is much love for the free market, but a free market in drugs - like Hamsterdam - might be even worse than what we have today in some ways. Drugs are commodities, not like onions, like medicines. They have the potential to be abused, but they can also be used for some legitimate purposes - me toking up in my house once a month isn’t going to hurt any one except my lungs.

So the only way to go is stop putting people in jail for something which is as common as dirt and start making the rules of the game for once.

Make it so you need a licence to sell controlled substances, put them in pharmacies and clinics or next to the spirits and cigarettes. Put the control in the hands of people who understand a bit more about health and mental issues and a bit less about showing corner kids who’s the man.

39

But wouldn’t The Zone drive down the prices ?
Less risks involved in the trade means less of a gamble to insure, and reduced dealer-on-dealer violence or theft means the competition would go from aggressive "who gets to deal on *this corner, bitch" to a more, well, normal free market economy, i.e. the best combination of low pricesproduct quality has the edge, and since increasing product quality means cutting it less, thus having less to sell, most would go for slashed prices.
Slashed prices, less crime needed to pay for your daily fix.

Or am I missing something ?

40

Since all the look outs and decoys are no longer necessary, expenses for distribution would fall in the zone or in any similar regulated circumstance. Plus putting all the drug dealers close to each other would increase competition.

Seems pretty obvious that drug prices fall and users don’t need to steal as much.