Published: Less than 10 min ago
In Amsterdam, school students are lured with free snus from criminals to recruit them into the gangs.
This is what the Amsterdam police warn in a video on social media.
“It smells good and looks good,” says a police officer, about the Swedish snus.
In Sweden, snus is part of everyday life, but in all other countries in the EU it is forbidden to sell snus.
In the Netherlands, snuff use has increased as a popular and less dangerous alternative to smoking, according to the country’s National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM).
According to the police in Amsterdam, Swedish snus has also started to be used as a recruitment method among criminal gangs to attract school students, mainly in grades 7 and 8, to carry out criminal acts. It reports the Dutch Hot Parool.
In a video that the police published on social media, they now warn that snus is addictive “even after the third bag”.
“It smells good and looks good, which is why children find it attractive to use,” says a police officer in the video, showing a snuff box from a Swedish tobacco company.
According to the police in the country, the criminals have a clear goal in trying to make the children addicted to the snus, so that they can then be used to perform various services for a reward or because you are in debt for having received snus for free.
“That’s how you slowly get drawn into crime,” says the police in the video.
Now the Amsterdam police urge young people in the Netherlands to dare to speak up if you have been victimized, and dare to say no if you receive an offer.
The police have not provided any exact figures on how common the new recruitment method is, but describe the method as “quite common”.