Violent Drug Gangs Bring Mayhem to Western Europe
wsj.com
wsj.com
One pet peeve I want to point out.
It is true that a number of (violent) organised crime groups in the Netherlands have a background in smuggling weed. (Weed is essentially legal to consume but illegal to grow in the Netherlands. Thus there is an associated underworld.)
Some of these groups then pivoted to the more profitable cocaine trade as demand for cocaine grew in Europa. These groups already had a criminal logistical network in place, positioning them well to profit from this new business. Note that, because of the specifics of container port cocaine trade (high risk of losing big shipments, higher punishments and police-related risk) it tends to be a much more violent business than the old weed trade.
However, I'm skeptical of the causal relation that is sometimes suggested between the semi-legal status of weed and the cocaine-related organized crime.
This reasoning implicitly presumes that if there was no previous legal consumption of weed that there would be a) no underworld related to growing weed and (i.e. the demand for weed would not exist) and b) organised crime related to cocaine would simply have skipped the Netherlands.
This seems extremely unlikely given what we know from every other country on the planet. Weed consumption in the Netherlands is not particularly high compared to other countries and I see little reason to think that banning the consumption of weed would have made the demand for weed suddenly disappear.
A very good test of the thesis can be found in Belgium - a similarly small country with a similarly large harbor - which never had legal weed consumption and has the exact same issues related to organized crime and cocaine trafficking..