Last weekend, the dutch police released their own perfume called XTACY. Packed in a bottle that ressembles the one of Chanel No 5 and with the tagline ‘Fragrance Intoxicatif By OM’, it got handed out as smell samples in the main shopping street of ’s Hertogenbosch. A promo team and a pop up booth was put in place to stop people on the street to let them know about the new product. While it looks like a designer brand, it smells like actual MDMA.
The idea of the OM (the Dutch Public Prosecution Service), who came up with the idea of the perfume, is not to make the Dutch smell like the party drug, nor to make money out of it. Instead they want to make everyone familiar with the anise smell of MDMA hoping they will recognize drug labs and report them to the police. Dutch public prosecutor Antoinette Doedens made a statement along with the launch of this initiative: “smell is the most important way that people can recognize an ecstasy lab. That is why we want to spread the smell over the entire country so that everyone knows what to look out for.” In the last few days, many samples were given to police departments and town halls. “We hope that other cities organize similar initiatives by making their habitants familiar with the smell in a pro active way”, Doedens says.
“Smell is the most important way that people can recognize an ecstasy lab. That's why we want to spread the smell over the country so that everyone knows what to look out for.”
's Hertogenbosch, the capital of the Dutch Gomorra
While the campaign might look frivolous at first sight, there is a harsh truth behind it: one of hard crime and toxic waste. It’s not a coincidence that ’s Hertogenbosch has been choses as the launching place of this product. The city with a population of only 152,968 is the capital of the North Brabant region in the Southern Netherlands. This region is, together with the neighboring Limbourg region, notorious for its drug labs. And it has always been.
The crime in the region already begun many ages ago. Back in the days, it was a swampy border area in between the southern (Spanish) Netherlands and the northern province of Holland that was difficult to conquer: the ideal location for criminals.
It was unclear exactly where the border between Holland and Brabant was, because the landscape did not lend itself to clear markings in many places. It was therefore easy to escape from authority; criminals hided in the wooded areas, and it was often unclear exactly which government should enforce where.
But even when there was the regional border with Holland was established officially and moved to the north, the crime stayed. As a catholic region, there wasn't much respect for the Dutch government in The Hague, as they considered it a protestant stronghold.
While the Randstad metropole (including the cities of Rotterdam, The Hague, Amsterdam and Utrecht) was established right north of the Brabant province, people in Brabant staled in their one horse towns. Many of them lived from smuggling: Butter, coffee, cigars, cotton, clothes, watches: if there was any trade in it, it was illegally brought across the border. There were numerous smuggling routes across the Belgian border that ran through poorly guarded nature reserves.
From butter to MDMA
The period after world war II was a golden age for the region. As butter got subsidized in The Netherlands, it became the ideal smuggling product, where it was sold for twice as much. With spike points and overloaded cars, they easily fooled the border controls. Just as butter, alcohol was a very popular product as well. Illegal alcohol distilleries had been producing alcohol for years when in the seventies and eighties ecstasy made its entrance in the Dutch party scene. For many Brabanders, it was a small step to turn their illegal distilleries into druglabs or potfarms.
Ever since, the labs and smuggling business has never left the region. Nowadays, because of the Schengen treaty, it's not an international border area anymore. However, its location is crucial for the international export of the synthetic drugs: Right in between Rotterdam and Antwerp, the 2 biggest ports of Europe, and a stone's throw away from London, Brussels, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin.
In 2017, the Dutch police estimated that over 614 million grams of speed and 972 million pills of ecstasy, worth almost 20 billion euros in total, where produced in the Netherlands. "We are by far the biggest synthetic drug producer in the world", the Dutch police stated in its report 'what could make a small country great'. And it's a growing business: more and more druglabs are established and they are getting bigger and bigger.
Synthetic drugs mean chemical waste
Even though the drug labs have always been present, the amount of chemical dumpings has increased enormously: In the last 4 years it has doubled from 150 to 300 dumpings. That means that chemical waste is being dumped on a daily basis. "The chemical waste that you get when producing synthetic drugs consist of Sodium hydroxide, a chemical drain cleaner. It's a highly caustic base that may cause severe chemical burns.", says Jorrit van den Berg, forensic researcher at the Dutch National Forensic Institute.
The waste gets dumped in residential areas and nature reserves and ruins both nature and human. Several stories are known where children unknowingly drive through the waste and get severe burns on their legs. Other people are exposed to chemical fumes, which may be deathly. In January, 3 Dutchmen got killed in a Belgian druglab because of chemical fumes.
The government promises a solution
The Dutch government has finally promised to invest yearly about 10 million euros in the battle again these illegal druglabs and thus its nasty chemical waste. However, it's very hard to tackle as the big guys always stay off the hook and the culture of silent, that's well settled in the region, prevent any information from being released. The Dutch government didn't consider the druglabs as a priority problem back in the days and let it grow until a point where it's worth almost 20 billion euros a year. [As a comparison: it could compete with the 29.324 Starbucks Coffee shops as the American coffee brand hits about the same yearly revenue (21 billion euros).]
With the perfume, the Dutch police hopes to get informed about the presence of a druglab by locals who would recognize the smell in order to get rid of the problems.
If you want to stay updated with the newest articles & exclusive promotions, subscribe to our free weekly newsletter.
댓글