There are some upsides to living in Brussels, as I have done for much of my adult life. The tax system sucks, but the cost of housing is reasonable (for this London boy anyway), the schools and hospitals are great, and there’s obviously the beer. But it’s by no means perfect, and by many measures, it’s getting worse. One of those measures is crime: a few days ago, a judge in Antwerp claimed that Belgium is becoming a narcostate.
I live in a pretty upmarket part of town, right next to the EU institutions, but my wife doesn’t feel safe leaving the house on her own after dark. We used to go to a really nice market in Clemenceau, but stopped because of a gunfight involving semi-automatic weapons that took place there a few months ago. Shops one district over from me seem to be chucking explosives at each other for reasons no-one really understands. Even as I write this, I’m reading about a shooting that took place last night literally down the road from where I live.
It’s getting so bad that longtime Brussels journalist Sam Wilkin is calling for the EU’s capital to be moved somewhere else, and it’s hard to disagree with his reasoning.
“At a more mundane level, civic order and decency have broken down” Wilkin writes. “The police don’t have enough resources to investigate things like bike theft, to the extent that most victims don’t even bother to report it. Every bench is tagged with graffiti and surrounded by litter”.
So if the Police can’t be bothered to investigate bike theft, nor can they seem to stop random machine gun fire in the city centre or prevent the country from becoming a narco state, how are they supposed to enforce the country’s ridiculous bans on nicotine pouches and disposable vapes? Well, they can’t.
Paul Van den Meersche, the Federal bureaucrat in charge of enforcing Belgium’s “ban everything” approach to nicotine policy, recently told Kiosk magazine that while “the illegal vape and tobacco market is flourishing mainly thanks to our increasingly strict legislation”, the government had “no concrete plans to address this problem”.
If you think that sounds arrogant, it seems to have come across even worse in the room: the journalist felt the need to add that Van den Meersche “remained silent for a moment, and you could tell he was annoyed by the question”.
So in a country where the top judges are writing letters calling the place a narco-state, the government wants to hand off the market in products that were perfectly legal a few months ago to the very same gangs causing all the violence, has no plans to do anything about it, and gets annoyed when questioned on the wisdom of it.
In Australia, that policy choice ended with firebombings of tobacconists in a war between biker gangs that Australian harm reduction activist Fiona Patten described in an interview with Clearing the Air.
In Belgium, we’re dealing with Albanian cocaine-smuggling rings who seem to basically own the Port of Antwerp. In an anonymous letter, the Antwerp judge who claims the country is becoming a narco state notes that “A home attack with a bomb or weapons of war, a home invasion, or a kidnapping are all easily ordered online. You don’t even need to go to the dark web; a Snapchat account is all it takes”.
These are the people who will take over the market for vaping and pouches if the Deputy PM and Health Minister Frack Vandenbroucke gets his way. In his mind, vaping is “an unhealthy and dangerous product that must be eliminated from the world”. Given the level of organised crime that already exists here, that approach will make Australia’s problems look like toddlers fighting over the swings in a playground.
This doesn’t seem to deter Vandenbroucke, who – as we revealed earlier this month – will host a seminar at the WHO’s gathering of anti-nicotine crusaders in November rather than sort out the problems in the country of which he is Deputy Prime Minister.
The complacent and inefficient administrative system in Brussels and Belgium seems to revel in annoying, obstructing and inconveniencing the people it seeks to govern. But when it comes to stopping crime, the Government seems bent on making things worse by handing off the market in products that were perfectly legal a few months ago to the very same gangs causing all the violence. Perhaps the anti-nicotine lobbyists who live here with me might think about that the next time they see a police cordon.
