‘People sometimes walk naked into a garden or business premises’
Freek Pecht, synthetic drugs coordinator in Zeeland-West-Brabant, has seen the numbers increasing since 2018: “It concerns people with misunderstood behavior who cause a nuisance. So people walk on the street at night – naked or not – and then sneak into the gardens from local residents or business premises.” With these types of reports, the police initially think of a possible burglar, but it increasingly turns out to be people under the influence of flakka.
“If a flakka user is in delirium, it is very difficult for the police to calm or control such a person,” says Pecht. “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.”
New flakka variant on the way
Last week, the Opium Act in the Netherlands was amended and the legal variant of flakka was banned. The police are pleased that the alpha-PIHP variant can no longer be sold. “That gives us as police a better toolbox, because we can now act on discovering that previously legal variant,” Pecht explains.
Yet he is not comfortable with it. “In the world of designer drugs, new variants are constantly emerging. 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 therefore hopes that the law to criminalize designer drugs will be introduced soon. In our country, a new bill is ready to ban entire groups of new psychoactive substances at once to prevent criminals from shifting their activities to substances that have not yet been banned. The law still needs to be approved by the Senate.
