With the highest concentration of museums in the world, Amsterdam offers no shortage of informative locations to reflect on its diverse cultural heritage. From art to fashion to cinema to sex, the physical museum space represents a seminal aspect of city’s identity, stimulating thought, debate, and dialogue across a wide range of issues, whether they are traditionally artistic or otherwise. Curiously – given its notoriety for cannabis, psychedelics, nightlife, and as a narcotic production center, another prominent aspect of the international Amsterdam brand – one area of discussion the city, and country, does not currently feature in a forum as such is a public institution offering education and resources on the issue of drug use and policy.
This month, however, a crowdfunding campaign launched looking to change this fact as the Mainline Foundation launched its Poppi initiative. Subtitled “Drugs Museum Amsterdam”
We asked Poppi Co-Creator (alongside Machteld Busz) Mick Jonkman some questions about the background of the museum.
Why do we need a museum about drugs?
There are a lot of misconceptions about drugs that lead to poor decisions, by both the individual and as a society. A lot of choices are nowadays made based on emotion, instead based on facts. We have chosen for the Museum so we can establish a publicly accessible physical place where people can go to learn and talk about drugs.
What can visitors expect when they visit the museum?
The people will be immersed in art, virtual reality, situation rooms and other creative ways to communicate the complete story about drugs. From health, culture and politics up until production, trafficking and motives. Visual arts, paintings and photograph collections. You can experience a psychedelic trip in Virtual Reality, but also be immersed in the harsh reality of a hardcore open drug-scene. The beautiful thing is, because we want to work a lot with artist collectives, we now have no idea how most of this is going to look like. But I am convinced it is going to be amazing!
How are you going to succeed in building this?
Our next step is the first pop-up exposition! We need as many people as possible to be a pre-ticket on our crowdfunding page so we can make it a success! The campaign functions also as a ‘proof of concept’ so we can show the people really want this. So, if you think it is important for trustworthy information about drugs being publicly available support this and spread it throughout your network!
