According to Philippe Close, mayor of Brussels and vice-president of the Socialist Party, the legalization of cannabis it is an act of common sense.
At a historical moment in which the Belgian capital is recording a surge in armed incidents between drug traffickers, according to Close, legalizing marijuana would favor fight against large-scale drug dealing of hard drugs.
"In the Socialist Party - he declared in a speech - we think that cannabis should be legalized and also its organized distribution as occurs in Canada and several American states."
"We must advance in layers, ask for a debate national in which the possibility of removing cannabis from police action is taken into consideration." By doing so, law enforcement will be able to focus on large traffickers and the entry of hard drugs in the country, such as the massive arrival of cocaine through the port of Antwerp.
Repression has failed: legalization is the solution
Although the use of cannabis is decriminalized in Belgium, as is the possession of up to 3 grams for adults, we now need to "think about the distribution of the substance by determining how to obtain it."
“Currently criminalize all of this means pushing our young people into criminal networks and there are many families who find themselves facing this problem. A company's mistake - he concludes - is when it wants to make invisible a problem that touches many layers of it rather than taking action to manage it."
In fact, Philippe Close states that he wants to tackle drug addiction in a “socio-healthcare”, without focusing exclusively on repression. "Why do people use drugs? How do we treat this addiction? How can we work with these young people?", he asks, "We opened a low-risk consumption room in the city of Brussels. We were the second after Liège to do so.
It is necessary first of all to work on prevention and on follow-up, rigorously supporting the associative environment. "We have always addressed the drug problem with the repression, never with prevention and monitoring - explains Close - The results are clear, prohibitionism has failed."
