Tourists, dealers or addicts. Security practices in response to open drug scenes in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Zürich, 1960-2000

Taking Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Zurich as examples—three cities with large, concentrated, open drug scenes in the 1980s and 1990s—we argue in this chapter that in response to the presence of drug use and trade in the city centres, different forms of social control were employed toward allegedly ‘local’ and ‘foreign’ actors in these scenes. In the 1980s and 1990s, drug policy, migration policy and criminal policy increasingly became entangled. While a public health approach gained ground for local and national users, practices of repatriation, criminalisation and deportation were seen in the dealings with foreign users. Europe in the late twentieth century did not have an adequate collective answer to the new, deeply transnational phenomenon of hard drug use and trade.