Rolling convulsively across the street or attacking people like zombies in a horror movie. The extremely addictive and dangerous drug flakka can do that to you. A drug that is also spreading devastatingly in the Netherlands. In the past year, police units in our country had to respond to flakka-related incidents almost a thousand times, an average of about three times a day.
This is evident from figures seen by the NPO Radio 1 podcast The Crime Bureau from Omroep WNL.
Significant increase in flakka in the Netherlands
Flakka is also called ‘zombie drug’. Users cause many problems, such as vandalism, nuisance, burglaries, theft, stabbings or collisions with possibly even fatal consequences.
The drug is increasingly appearing in our country. In 2023 there were 995 incidents, compared to 614 incidents in the previous year. The police have their hands full, especially in the Zeeland-West Brabant region. In the past year, the most reports were received by the police, namely 566. That is more than half of the total number.
A lot of inconvenience
Freek Pecht, synthetic drugs coordinator Zeeland-West-Brabant, has seen an increase since 2018. “These are people with misunderstood behavior who cause nuisance. So people walk on the street at night – naked or not – and then sneak into the gardens of local residents or business premises.”
The police initially think of a burglar, but increasingly it is someone under the influence of the ‘zombie drug’. “If a flakka user is in delirium, it is very difficult for the police to calm or control such a person. We know of examples where the police have to jump on a suspect not with one police officer, but with five or six police officers and ultimately put him in handcuffs.”
Amendment of the Opium Act
The Opium Act was amended last week. The legal variant of flakka has been banned. The police are happy with that. “That gives us as police a better toolbox, because we can now act on discovering that previously legal variant.”
However, Pecht is not completely reassured: “New variants are constantly emerging in the world of designer drugs. In the short term, the criminalization has an effect, but in the long term we have to wait for the day – which will come today or tomorrow – when a new flakka variant appears again.”
The police officer hopes that the law to criminalize designer drugs will be introduced soon. A new bill is ready to ban entire groups of new psychoactive substances at once. This should prevent criminals from shifting their activities to substances that are not yet banned. The law still needs to be approved by the Senate.
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