We are making some of the same mistakes as other countries do like make it more and more and more illegal instead of loosening some of the drug laws.

That’s exactly why she says the Netherlands risks becoming a narco-state. Well, that, and other countries doing the same:

The challenges we now face in the Netherlands are not an indictment of our liberal drug policy. Rather the opposite. Take the Dutch government’s approach to MDMA, influenced by the global war on drugs, which has become increasingly repressive since the late 1980s and early 90s. Under international pressure, the Netherlands placed MDMA, which is known as a party drug and perceived as relatively harmless, under the Opium Act in 1988, classifying it as a hard drug. This shift inadvertently contributed to the profitability of illegal MDMA production and created a lucrative business model for criminal organisations, as evidenced by the estimated €18.9bn street value of annual ecstasy production in the Netherlands. This experience reveals how efforts to align with global drug prohibition trends can have counterproductive outcomes.

What the Netherlands’ problems reveal is the need for a global shift in the current approach. It’s not a matter of retracting our user-centred policy, but rather advocating for international recognition that the war on drugs is counterproductive.