• Home /
• Statewatch Database /
• Netherlands: police cannabis supplier?

Netherlands: police cannabis supplier?

01 May 1995

News has come to light of another "controlled delivery" operation that went wrong and led to some 20,000 kilos of cannabis being distributed on the market through a police informer, and 5 million guilders in "controlled" drug profits still unaccounted for. This appears to be a follow-up on the IRT affair. The original IRT affair started in December 1993, when the Amsterdam police discovered a huge narcotics operation run in complete secrecy by the so-called Interregional Recherche Team (Interregional Detectives Team), a police unit installed years earlier to combat organized crime. The IRT allowed an informant to organize a cannabis importing pipeline from Colombia which brought an estimated 40,000 kilos onto the European market, 30,000 kilos of which were lost and sold on the streets. This amount equals the annual consumption of soft drugs in Holland. In the months following, a scandal broke out in which two ministers lost their jobs. An investigation by the Wierenga Commission in March 1994 had concluded that "nothing illegitimate" had happened because nearly all of the cannabis had been confiscated. This conclusion still remains the official line in the Hague, but two weeks after the Wierenga report appeared, the Amsterdam public prosecutor responsible, Mr Monte Van Capelle, wrote a confidential report to then-minister Mr Ernst Hirsch Ballin in which he admitted that about 25,000 kilos of soft drugs had indeed disappeared in the operation. Mr Hirsch Ballin later refused to answer questions in parliament about the amount of drugs involved.