{"id":29865,"date":"2025-10-30T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/?p=29865"},"modified":"2025-10-30T14:46:25","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T14:46:25","slug":"opinion-belgium-is-becoming-a-narco-state-so-the-governments-giving-them-another-market-to-play-in-nicotine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/post\/opinion-belgium-is-becoming-a-narco-state-so-the-governments-giving-them-another-market-to-play-in-nicotine\/","title":{"rendered":"OPINION: Belgium is becoming a narco-state, so the Government\u2019s giving the gangs another market to play in: nicotine."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2019s obviously the beer. But it\u2019s by no means perfect, and by many measures, it\u2019s getting worse. One of those measures is crime: a few days ago, a judge in Antwerp claimed that Belgium is becoming a narcostate<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I live in a pretty upmarket part of town, right next to the EU institutions, but my wife doesn\u2019t 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<\/a> that took place there a few months ago. Shops one district over from me seem to be chucking explosives at each other<\/a> for reasons no-one really understands. Even as I write this, I\u2019m reading about a shooting that took place last night literally down the road from where I live<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s getting so bad that longtime Brussels journalist Sam Wilkin is calling for the EU\u2019s capital to be moved somewhere else<\/a>, and it\u2019s hard to disagree with his reasoning. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cAt a more mundane level, civic order and decency have broken down\u201d Wilkin writes. \u201cThe police don\u2019t have enough resources to investigate things like bike theft, to the extent that most victims don\u2019t even bother to report it. Every bench is tagged with graffiti and surrounded by litter\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

So if the Police can\u2019t 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\u2019s ridiculous bans on nicotine pouches and disposable vapes? Well, they can\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Van den Meersche, the Federal bureaucrat in charge of enforcing Belgium\u2019s \u201cban everything\u201d approach to nicotine policy, recently told Kiosk magazine<\/a> that while \u201cthe illegal vape and tobacco market is flourishing mainly thanks to our increasingly strict legislation\u201d, the government had \u201cno concrete plans to address this problem\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cremained silent for a moment, and you could tell he was annoyed by the question\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Belgium, we\u2019re dealing with Albanian cocaine-smuggling rings<\/a> 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”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201can unhealthy and dangerous product that must be eliminated from the world\u201d. Given the level of organised crime that already exists here, that approach will make Australia\u2019s problems look like toddlers fighting over the swings in a playground. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This doesn’t seem to deter Vandenbroucke, who – as we revealed earlier this month<\/a> – will host a seminar at the WHO\u2019s gathering of anti-nicotine crusaders in November rather than sort out the problems in the country of which he is Deputy Prime Minister.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":990004,"featured_media":29866,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[257],"tags":[344,336,186],"slider":[],"class_list":["post-29865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-australia","tag-belgium","tag-nicotine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/990004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29865"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29935,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29865\/revisions\/29935"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29865"},{"taxonomy":"slider","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clearingtheair.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/slider?post=29865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}