The town of Volendam is best known for its picturesque port and it's also a major tourist destination. It's now also a cocaine use hotspot. According to the report, on any weekend between 50% and 80% of under-25s use cocaine. That puts the weekend cocaine consumption in town at one to two kilos. This comes out of a 3-month project run by the police in Volendam this summer, the aim of which was the reduce the excessive use of drugs and alcohol. It failed miserably. A police spokesman said that using cocaine was considered completely normal. An anonymous telephone hotline to snitch on dealers received no calls at all.

I wonder how they came up with the 50 to 80% number. The margin seems rather wide which leads me to suspect that the data gathering might not have been too strict. Furthermore, one to two kilos of cocaine is a lot. According the to most recent data I could find, a gram of cocaine cost between 32 and 49 euro in the 1998 to 2000 period. Multiply that by a thousand for a kilogram of cocaine, and you're talking between 30k and 50k in weekly turnover. It's a lot of money, but I suppose it's not so much that people can't afford it. The combined population of Volendam and Edam is about 28,000. Assuming a shot of cocaine is a gram, that gives us between 1,000 and 2,000 people using the cocaine, and fewer than that if the average shot is larger. If the 50% of under-25s number is correct and we put a lower limit to the age band at 15, this means that there should be between 2,000 and 4,000 people in that age band in the area; this works out at between 7% and 14%. That is close enough to make sense. The 80% number is almost certainly too high, because this would mean that the 15-25 population would comprise only 2 to 4% over the overall population. That is way too low.

Cocaine is nominally illegal in the Netherlands and the authorities are trying to stop trafficking in it. Given the widespread use of cocaine, it seems they're not having much luck. The more interesting aspect of this story is that it provides a great opportunity to study what would happen if drugs like cocaine were legalized. Such widespread use as in Volendam amounts to de facto legalization (although a further drop in price would be expected if the frictional costs of extralegality were removed). How are the cocaine users doing? Is it affecting their job performance? Is it affecting their health? How dependent on the drug are they? What is the impact on crime?

I do hope somebody is using Volendam for some serious data gathering. It's too good an opportunity to pass up.