What Belgium’s cannabis crisis reveals about organised crime, human nature and the limits of political ambition.

What Belgium’s cannabis crisis tells us about the oldest mistake in politics ?

Justin Trudeau promised that legalising cannabis would keep the drug away from children and take profits away from organised crime. Eight years later, Belgian customs officers are carrying assault rifles as they intercept record quantities of legally grown Canadian cannabis being smuggled into Europe by international criminal syndicates.

If irony could be packed into a shipping container, this would be it.

A recent Telegraph investigation, showed that Canadian cannabis is now arriving through Antwerp in unprecedented quantities. Belgian officials describe corrupt dock workers, sophisticated trafficking routes, Chinese organised crime, and a market in which legally produced cannabis can command several times its Canadian price once it reaches Europe.

This was not the promised ending.

The policy promised to eliminate organised crime. Organised crime saw a business opportunity

When I first read that Belgian customs officers were carrying assault rifles because they were intercepting tonnes of cannabis legally grown in Canada, I laughed. Not because it was funny. It wasn’t. But because it was so completely predictable.

The irony was hard to miss. Canada legalised cannabis in part because it was argued that a regulated market would undercut organised crime. Yet here were Belgian authorities dealing with sophisticated criminal networks trafficking Canadian cannabis across Europe. The policy hadn’t abolished the black market. It had simply given it something new to trade.

I’m not suggesting that weakening organised crime was the only reason for legalisation. Supporters also wanted to regulate quality, reduce criminal convictions for possession and bring cannabis production into a legal framework. Those are legitimate objectives, and reasonable people can disagree about how well Canada has achieved them.

But one question has stayed with me ever since I read the story.

Why were so many intelligent people genuinely surprised that organised crime adapted?

I’ve spent most of my adult life working in addiction. Over the years I’ve sat in treatment centres, recovery meetings, prisons, hospitals, government consultations and family kitchens. I’ve watched parents bury children, seen people rebuild lives that once looked beyond saving, and listened to more policy announcements than I can remember.

One thing becomes obvious after a while. Drug markets are extraordinarily adaptable.

That isn’t cynicism. It’s simply what happens when money, desperation and human ingenuity collide.

Close one supply route and another appears. Restrict one substance and somebody starts selling something else. Change the rules and the market quietly reorganises itself around the new incentives. Sometimes the changes are obvious. More often they’re subtle, only becoming apparent months or years later.

After you’ve watched this happen often enough, you stop expecting simple solutions.

That’s why the Belgian story didn’t strike me as an isolated failure. It felt like another chapter in a much older story. The details change, the substances change and the politics changes, but the underlying pattern remains remarkably consistent.

Perhaps that’s because we’ve been asking the wrong question.

We spend a great deal of time asking how governments should respond to organised crime. We spend far less time asking how organised crime will respond to government.

That may sound like a small distinction, but I don’t think it is. In fact, I suspect it’s the question that sits behind almost every disappointment in modern drug policy.

Adam Smith would probably have recognised it immediately. He understood something that has never stopped being true: people respond to incentives. Criminal organisations are no exception. They don’t read ministerial speeches or strategy documents. They look at the world as it is, ask where the opportunities now lie and quietly adjust.

The real mystery, then, isn’t why organised crime adapts.

It’s why we’re still surprised when it does.

Adam Smith (1723–1790), still waiting for governments to realise that markets don’t respond to good intentions and wondering how The Wealth of Nations’ somehow became optional reading.

What strikes me is that this way of thinking isn’t confined to drug policy. You see it across modern politics.

Faced with a difficult social problem, our instinct is often to look for the lever that government can pull. Pass a law. Create a strategy. Establish a new agency. Launch a consultation. None of those things is necessarily wrong. Governments have an essential responsibility to uphold justice and protect the public. The mistake is assuming that once the policy has been announced, the hard part is over.

In my experience, that’s usually when the hard part begins.

I’ve sat through enough policy launches over the years to recognise a familiar pattern. The intentions are often sincere. The people involved are usually intelligent and well-meaning. Yet there is sometimes an unspoken assumption that if we redesign the system carefully enough, people will simply adjust to fit it.

Life is rarely so accommodating.

Families don’t behave like spreadsheets. Communities aren’t machines waiting to be recalibrated. Addiction certainly doesn’t read government strategies before deciding what to do next. The people caught up in it respond to relationships, despair, hope, opportunity, fear and love. So do the markets that grow up around addiction. They don’t pause because a minister has made an announcement. They adapt.

That is why I think Edmund Burke remains so relevant. He understood that society isn’t something we construct from scratch every few years. It’s an inheritance made up of relationships, habits, institutions and loyalties that have developed over generations. Interfere with one part and you rarely change only that part. Something else moves in response, often in ways nobody could have seen.

I’ve never seen a policy arrive exactly as its architects imagined. Sometimes the unexpected consequences are small. Sometimes they’re beneficial. Sometimes they’re devastating. But there are always consequences, because people are not passive recipients of policy. They react to it, work around it, resist it or take advantage of it.

Organised crime is exceptionally good at this.

One of the reasons is that criminal organisations don’t have the luxury of ignoring reality. Their survival depends on noticing changes before anyone else does. If the profits disappear in one market, they look for another. If enforcement becomes tougher in one place, they shift somewhere else. If a legal market opens, they ask a simple question: how can we make money from this?

That isn’t because criminals are uniquely intelligent. It’s because incentives have a way of concentrating the mind.

Adam Smith understood this long before anyone spoke about drug policy. He recognised that people respond to incentives because they always have. The surprise isn’t that organised crime behaves economically. The surprise is that governments so often behave as though it won’t.

Perhaps that’s because politics and organised crime are solving different problems.

Politics quite understandably asks, “What policy should we introduce?”

Organised crime asks, “What has this policy made profitable?”

Those are not the same question.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect we’ve spent years answering the first while paying far too little attention to the second. That doesn’t mean governments should stop acting. It means they should begin with a little more humility about how complex societies actually work.

Nature’s response to central planning

One of the curious differences between organised crime and government is that cartels cannot afford to cling to failed business models. Profit has a way of concentrating the mind. Bureaucracies, by contrast, possess an extraordinary talent for mistaking persistence for success. When reality refuses to cooperate, they commission another review, establish another working group, publish another strategy and congratulate themselves on having “learned the lessons”. The market, meanwhile, has already adapted.

Unlike governments, organised crime cannot afford the luxury of believing that good intentions are a substitute for results.”

Edmund Burke warned against precisely this kind of political overconfidence. Society, he argued, is not a machine to be rebuilt according to theory but a living partnership whose countless relationships cannot be understood from a ministerial desk. Change one part without understanding the whole and unintended consequences are not unfortunate accidents.

They are entirely predictable.

The face of a man who knew reality doesn’t read policy documents

So where does that leave us?

Not, I think, with the conclusion that government should simply give up. That would be every bit as simplistic as believing it can solve addiction by passing another law.

Government matters. Good policing matters. Effective treatment matters. Sensible regulation matters. None of those things is optional. But after thirty years working alongside people with addiction, I’ve become convinced that we often invest our greatest energy in the wrong place.

We spend an extraordinary amount of time arguing about how to manage drug markets and comparatively little asking how to help people leave them altogether.

That strikes me as an odd imbalance.

Every few years a new intervention captures the political imagination. It might be a change in legislation, a new harm reduction initiative, a different commissioning model or another national strategy. Each arrives with understandable optimism and often with genuinely good intentions.

What rarely receives the same attention is the slow, patient work of helping another human being rebuild a life.

That work isn’t dramatic. It doesn’t generate many headlines. It doesn’t fit neatly into performance indicators or election cycles. Most of the time it happens quietly. One person stops using. A family begins to trust again. Someone returns to work. A father sees his children. A grandmother sleeps through the night for the first time in years because she no longer fears a knock at the door.

I’ve been fortunate enough to witness those moments many times.

Trust me they don’t happen because a market was redesigned. They happen because people are capable of change.

Whenever I hear politicians talk about disrupting organised crime, I sometimes find myself wondering what the dealers fear most. Is it another government strategy? Another piece of legislation? Another consultation?

If I were running a criminal organisation, the thing that would worry me most would not be a minister standing behind a lectern announcing a new initiative.

It would be people recovering. Every person who enters lasting recovery is a customer permanently lost. Every family restored is one less household shaped by addiction. Every recovery community quietly shrinks the market that organised crime depends upon.

We rarely describe recovery in economic terms, but perhaps we should.

Recovery changes the market more profoundly than most public policies ever can, because it changes the demand itself.

That doesn’t mean recovery is easy. Anyone who has worked in this field knows it isn’t. People relapse. Lives remain complicated. There are no guarantees. But if our ambition is genuinely to weaken organised crime, it seems strange that we devote so much intellectual energy to the supply of drugs and so comparatively little to reducing the demand for them through lasting recovery.

Perhaps that says something about modern politics.

It’s often easier to redesign systems than to invest patiently in people.

When your entire article can be summarised by the first ten seconds of this song. The unofficial soundtrack to arbitrage.

What We Keep Forgetting

The longer I’ve worked in the addiction industry, the less convinced I’ve become that our greatest problems are caused by a lack of government action. More often, they stem from expecting government to do things it was never designed to do.

A government can pass laws. It can police the streets, regulate markets and punish those who exploit others. Those are essential responsibilities, and no civilised society can do without them.

But governments cannot create trust between neighbours.

They cannot manufacture hope in someone who has given up on themselves.

They cannot legislate a father’s reconciliation with his son, or a mother’s confidence that her daughter will come home safely.

Those things belong somewhere else.

They belong to families, friendships, faith communities, recovery fellowships and neighbourhoods. They belong to the ordinary relationships that give people reasons to live differently.

That is why I have become increasingly drawn to the principle of subsidiarity found in Catholic social teaching. It isn’t an argument for a weak state. Nor is it an argument against government. It is simply the recognition that problems should be addressed at the most human level capable of addressing them. Larger institutions have an important role, but they cannot replace the smaller communities where character is formed, responsibility is learned and lives are rebuilt.

Recovery taught me that long before I ever encountered the word subsidiarity.

The people who changed my life weren’t politicians or policy makers. They were men and women in recovery who gave their time freely, believed in me when I had stopped believing in myself and showed me, often by quiet example rather than grand speeches, that another way of living was possible.

I’ve watched that happen thousands of times since.

No government programme can manufacture that kind of human relationship. It can support it. It can remove barriers to it. It can avoid undermining it. But it cannot replace it.

Perhaps that’s the lesson hidden inside the Belgian cannabis story.

The failure wasn’t simply that organised crime adapted. It was that we expected a policy to accomplish what only people ultimately can. We looked for a legislative solution to a profoundly human problem.

That doesn’t mean public policy is unimportant. Good policy matters enormously. But good policy begins with a realistic understanding of human nature. It recognises that people respond to incentives, that markets adapt, that unintended consequences are inevitable and that the strongest societies are built from the bottom up, not engineered from the top down.

After almost 3 decades in this field, I’ve become wary of anyone who promises that one new law, strategy or intervention will finally solve the addiction issue.

Human beings are more complicated than that. So are families and so are communities.

Perhaps that’s frustrating for politicians. It certainly makes life more complicated for those of us working in addiction.

But there is hope in it too.

Because if human beings are capable of creating markets, criminal networks and systems of exploitation, they are also capable of recovery, forgiveness and renewal.

I’ve seen enough of that to know which force I would rather place my faith in.

Source: Annemarie Ward

Author

Annemarie Ward
CEO, Faces & Voices of Recovery UK

annemarie@facesandvoicesofrecoveryuk.org

http://www.facesandvoicesofrecoveryuk.org

Note: This article is published with permission.