Methadonbus

Title

Methadonbus

Author/Creator

Hugo Kaagman (1955), Amsterdam artist

Date Created

1980 – 1985

Abstract

Art work on the mobile methadone clinic ('methadone bus") as a typically Dutch phenomenon.

Description

Hugo Kaagman (1955, Haarlem) is often called the Dutch stencil king. From the 1970s onwards, Kaagman used templates for his street art, often with a political message. From the 1980s onwards, he combined the colors of the famous Dutch (originally from China) delft-blue pottery with scenes from everyday life and geometric motifs. The bus in this painting seems to be on its way to the Dutch tulip fields and windmills, until you discover that to the left of the bus injection needles are applied with a template. From 1979, the first methadone bus (mobile clinic) drove through Amsterdam to provide heroin addicts with liquid methadone at fixed times and places. The Methadone programme was a form of municipal 'disaster relief'. The public order problem was acute because of the explosion of heroin use. In 1980, experts estimated the number of juvenile heroin addicts in the capital at ten thousand. About two thousands of them were from Suriname and the first bus was meant especially for a ‘stray group’, as they were called in policy papers, of users with a Surinamese migration background, who had squatted a building in the city centre. After this first bus, others quickly followed that were open to all heroin users in Amsterdam.

Subject

Methadone maintenance

Spatial Coverage (Place)

Amsterdam

Format/size

100 - 200 cm

Source

Amsterdam Museum

Rights Holder

Amsterdam Museum

Rights

Amsterdam Museum/Hugo Kaagman

Relation to other item

"Waiting for the next one". The history of first mobile methadone clinic ('Methadone Bus") in Amsterdam (1979)

Narcotic Archive Item-ID

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