Ok, here we go. Every few months I have to explain this to someone once again. So here goes...
HOLLAND'S HALF-BAKED DRUG EXPERIMENT
THE NARCOTICS CAPITAL OF EUROPE
"LOOK AT the Dutch example!" That phrase has become a kind of mantra, chanted whenever the advocates of liberalizing drug laws in Europe or the United States gather. The Dutch, liberalization proponents argue, got it right by legalizing the public sale, under certain restraints, of cannabis products in their now-famous coffee shops and by adopting a much more lenient policy toward all forms of drug use and abuse based on a philosophy of "harm reduction."
But did they? It has been almost a quarter-century since the Dutch Parliament set Holland's drug policy on a course of its own, one markedly different from that of the rest of Europe. Surely 23 years is enough time to examine the consequences of that policy. How has it affected drug use and addiction in the Netherlands? What impact has it had on Holland's next-door neighbors, France, Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom? Do the results really justify holding the Dutch drug policy up as a model for other nations to follow? Or are they a warning about the risks of following the Dutch example?
At the time the Baan Commission report was adopted, Holland had what was considered a serious heroin addiction problem, albeit one roughly comparable to that of its European neighbors. The nation was relatively untroubled by major international drug traffickers, with the exception of a number of Chinese "triads" ( gangs ) whose trafficking was pretty much confined to the Dutch marketplace.
How has that situation changed today? First and most revealing, Holland (in the words of senior customs and police officers in the United Kingdom, France, and Belgium) has become "the drugs capital of western Europe"--and not just of those soft drugs depenalized by the Dutch Parliament but also of hard drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and now ecstasy.
Britain's Customs and Excise Department figures that 80 percent of the heroin seized in the United Kingdom either passed through or was temporarily warehoused in Holland. The Paris police estimate that 80 percent of the heroin consumed in the French capital comes from Holland. The forthcoming 1998 figures for France's Central Office for the Repression of the Illegal Traffic in Drugs will, one of the organizations senior officers says, show "an explosion" of drugs coming into France from the Netherlands.
"Holland has become the place for drug traffickers to work," states a senior officer at Her Majesty's Customs and Excise. "It's central. You've got guys there who have access to any kind of drug you want, smugglers who can deliver it for you to Liverpool or London. And it's an environment which is relatively trouble-free from a criminal's point of view. It's ideal, and it has become a magnet for our criminal types."
As a senior French narcotics officer puts it, "Holland is Europe's drug supermarket. Drugs of all kinds are freely available there. The price is cheap. Your chances of getting caught with them are minimal, and you can carry them home across our customs-free borders without a care."
Worse, the greatest drug problem facing European youth today comes from synthetic drugs like ecstasy and amphetamines that have spread across Europe like a virus since they were first introduced in Holland in 1987. British police estimate that a million of these pills are swallowed every weekend in British discos and clubs. Overwhelmingly, these synthetic drugs are coming from and being made in Holland. British customs states that virtually all the pills seized in the United Kingdom last year were manufactured in Holland or Belgium. Ninety-eight percent of the amphetamines seized in France in 1997 came from Holland, as did 73.6 percent of the ecstasy tablets. During an official briefing last summer, a senior Dutch police officer admitted to former General Barry McCaffrey, the U.S. drug-policy czar, that "Holland is to synthetic drugs what Colombia is to cocaine."
Holland's emergence as the drug capital of Europe is not due solely to the decision by the Dutch government to commercialize the sale of cannabis products in the nation's now-famous coffee shops. But many Europeans believe it is the consequence of the tolerant attitude toward drugs that grew out of that policy. That attitude, defined by Dutch foes of the policy as the "coffee-shop mentality," now permeates Holland's criminal justice system.
"If you want to do drugs, Holland is the place to do them," notes one of France's top drug police officers. "The light sentences they hand out [and] the liberal attitude of their judges has resulted in an explosion in the number of international trafficking groups operating out of Holland."
"As a drug dealer," a senior U.K. customs officer observes, "you are less likely to come to the attention of the police in Holland than you are in any other country in Western Europe. For our Dutch counterparts to get permission to conduct a surveillance operation is unbelievably difficult. It is absolutely impossible to place a bug in a drug dealer's home or office. Get arrested with 50 kilos of heroin or cocaine in France or England, and you'll be sentenced to 20 years to life [and] serve at least 17 of those years in prisons that are less than welcoming. Get arrested with the same amount of either drug in Holland, and the most you'll get is eight years, of which you'll serve only four in prisons, where you'll be in your own cell, with color TV and a stereo, and have the right to a conjugal visit twice a month from a woman who may--or may not--be your wife. Is it any wonder then that the country has become the drug traffickers' preferred working place?"
But what about the policy's consequences for the Dutch themselves? "Our liberal drug policy has been a failure, but its advocates are so rooted to their convictions they can't bring themselves to admit it," says Dr. Franz Koopman, director of De Hoop (The Hope) drug rehabilitation center in Dordecht and an open opponent of the Dutch policy. "First, we banalized cannabis use. We have left our kids with the idea that it's perfectly all right to smoke it, and from there it was an easy step for them to move to the notion that it's also okay to use mind-altering substances like ecstasy. It is that mentality that is behind the explosion in the use of these synthetics we've seen in the last three years, and [it] is a grave peril to this country just as it is to the rest of Europe."
DUTCH CRITICS of their nation's drug policy--and even some of its proponents--admit that it is characterized by at best wishful thinking and at worst hypocrisy. The Dutch even have an expression and a gesture for this: You place the palm of your right hand on the tip of your nose and spread your fingers. You are now "looking through the fingers"--alles door de vingers zien--seeing only what you want to see and blotting out the rest.
...Probably 70 percent of the cannabis now puffed in Holland's 1,500 coffee shops is Nederwiet. The result? "We see more and more people getting into trouble with cannabis," acknowledges Dr. J. A. Wallenberg, the director of the Jellinek Clinic, Holland's best-known drug abuse rehabilitation center. "We have indulged ourselves in a kind of blind optimism in Holland concerning cannabis. [Use of] this stronger THC cannabis has stabilized at too high a level. We see young users with psychological problems who use it as a form of self-medication. It can and does produce a chronically passive individual ... someone who is lazy, who doesn't want to take initiatives, doesn't want to be active--the kid who'd prefer to lie in bed with a joint in the morning rather than getting up and doing something."
Even Dr. Ernest Bunning of the Ministry of Health, the central repository of Holland's liberal drug philosophy, largely agrees. "There are young people who abuse soft drugs," he admits, "Particularly those that have this high THC. The place that cannabis takes in their lives becomes so dominant they don't have space for the other important things in life. They crawl out of bed in the morning, grab a joint, don't work, smoke another joint. They don't know what to do with their lives. I don't want to call it a drug problem because if I do, then we have to get into a discussion that cannabis is dangerous, that sometimes you can't use it without doing damage to your health or your psyche. The moment we say, 'There are people who have problems with soft drugs,' our critics will jump on us, so it makes it a little bit difficult for us to be objective on this matter."
HENDRIK AND PIETER'S JOINT VENTURE
AS THE coffee shops boomed between 1984 and 1996, marijuana use among Dutch youths aged 18 to 25 leapt by well over 200 percent.
In 1997, there was a 25 percent increase in the number of registered cannabis addicts receiving treatment for their habit, as compared to a mere 3 percent rise in cases of alcohol abuse. In 1995, public Ministry of Justice studies estimated that 700,000 to 750,000 of Holland's 15 million people--about 5 percent of the population--were regular cannabis users. A much more recent study just completed by Professor Pieter Cohen of the University of Amsterdam disputes those figures, claiming that only 325,000 to 350,000 Dutch men and women are regular cannabis users. Unfortunately, however, his survey discovered that those smokers are particularly concentrated among the young in densely populated areas of Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Rotterdam. In the last three to four years, these same areas have witnessed a skyrocketing growth in juvenile crime and the number of youths involved in acts of violence associated by many Dutch law-enforcement officers with the abuse of "soft" drugs. With remarkable candor, Amsterdam Police Commissioner Jelle Kuiper declared more than 18 months ago, "As long as our political class tries to pretend that soft drugs do not create dependence, we are going to go on being confronted daily with problems that officially do not exist. We are aware of an enormous number of young people strongly dependent on soft drugs, with all the consequences that has." A few months later, his counterpart in The Hague, the de facto Dutch capital, echoed his views: "Sixty-five percent of the persistent rise we are seeing in criminality is due to juveniles and above all juvenile drug users."
...Jansen estimates that this pot crop--a direct outgrowth of Holland's drug policy--comes from some 25,000 to 30,000 small-to medium-scale producers, most of them growing their grass indoors, in a garage, a basement, or a back room. Under Dutch law, anyone may possess five plants for personal use. Virtually all those growers are raising far more than that because, as an American narcotics officer in The Hague notes, "the profits from growing Nederwiet are tremendous, way out of proportion to any risks the grower runs."
THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY
IN THE 1970s, advocates of Holland's coffee-shop policy argued that providing soft-drug users with a shopping outlet in which to buy their drugs would keep them from falling prey to drug-peddling criminals. At the same time, they would be corralled off from hard-drug users into a congenial environment of their own. Petty criminality would fall, and hard-drug consumption would be cut by offering young people an attractive alternative.
That was the theory. Unfortunately, it did not work. A 1997 report on hard-drug use in the Netherlands by the government-financed Trimbos Institute acknowledged that "drug use is considered to be the primary motivation behind crimes against property"--23 years after the Dutch policy was supposed to put the brake on that. Furthermore, the Trimbos report put the number of heroin addicts in Holland at 25,000, a figure so low that critics of the government say it "Promotes a policy, not a reality." That statistic is based, the skeptics note, on the number of heroin addicts who actually come into contact one way or another with the nation's social or justice departments. The real figure, they maintain, is far closer to 35,000. But even if one accepts the Trimbos figures as correct, they represent almost a tripling of the number of Dutch addicts since the country liberalized its drug policies. They also mean that Holland has twice as many heroin addicts per capita as Britain, which is known for having one of the most serious heroin problems in Europe. Furthermore, the number of heroin addicts being treated in the methadone-maintenance programs run by the Ministry of Public Health went from 6,511 in 1988 to 9,838 in 1997, an increase of just over 50 percent--hardly an indication that heroin use has declined since the introduction of the coffee-shop law.
The sale of hard drugs at the coffee shops was strictly forbidden by the law that created them. That was an edict honored for years more in the breach than in the observance. Michel Bouchet, now an officer of the French Ministry of the Interior but for many years the head of the Paris narcotics squad, regularly sent his officers to Holland undercover to see if hard drugs were being sold in the coffee shops. Almost inevitably, they discovered that they were.
And on and on and on...
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n444.a01.html
Again, I state IT HAS BEEN A COMPLETE DISASTER. Anyone who says otherwise is in COMPLETE DENIAL.
Finally, I will leave you with one simple question. Can you name for me a SINGLE activity that has DECREASED in occurence when that activity was made legal after being illegal? NAME ONE.
Good luck.
Holland has foolishly implemented their system of policing drugs but Switzerland has not. They have similar laws regarding Marijuana but with one exception, that it is not permitted to be sold. People can grow it and they can smoke but they cannot sell it, especially to foreigners.
The result is they have no drug tourism, no sensational media headlines etc etc. No one ever use Swiss policy to back up their opinions for some reason.
Correction: It is not illegal to sell to the Swiss but Foreigners do get punished..
Consuming unlicensed rotgut to the point of going blind or dying, in a single evening. It was a weekly event in every major US city during prohibition, and unheard of afterwards.
Blovations by bureaucrats and foreign police authorities hardly consititutes a devastating statistically based refutation of the points made in the sources I've referred to. Even if you can produce several reams of it. And even though you use shouting punctuation.
Could you kindly explain why Holland's parents and teachers haven't rioted in the streets in the last couple of decades to correct this? Do think there is something in Dutch blood that causes this craven indifference to the welfare of their children? Or could it be that the classrooms have reflected what the Dutch statistics showed: that there was a marked decrease in classroom addiction and drug-induced dropout rates after de-criminalization? What parent is going to give a hoot in hell whether Holland exports marijuana, or banned banana chips, or anything else, to other lands, if the price they pay to stop it is to return to US levels of classroom failure rates?
Just because you can manage to blurt out a couple of hysterical, largely anecdotal, quotes does not mean you have actually provided a serious arguement. Despite needle park, and despite these sorts of loopy op ed pieces such as yours, Hollland is not remarkably more or less civilized, without remarkably more or less problems with drugs than any other part of Europe. If it were, there'd statistics to back up these allegations. Of course there aren't--there never are in prohibitionist arguments--, because as soon as you start dragging out statistics, you make US statistics, which put the statistics of any country in europe to shame, become fair game. So here's your basic statistical problem: How come Holland and Switzerland, and Britain until the mid-60's, managed, on a reasonably objectively measureable basis, to do at least as well as the US, and usually better by a good margin, along almost any parameter you can look at with their drug problems?
Why did drug addiction go largely unnoticed in the US when it was legal as dirt, up until the first half of the 20th century?
Why did Oregon's and Alaska's brief (because the Feds were embarassed by the results, and shut them down) experiments with de-criminalization produce very little significant change in usage statistics? If your argument were sound, there would be devastating evidence of huge rises in usage--there is not--if there were anything but loud noise for evidence, it would have been vetted by the Young or the Nixon commissions--they were not. At best, what one sees is a slight early bulge in usage, as addicts emmigrate from more repressive regimes, followed by a permanent decline. This is an argument that depends just about entirely on bluffing for it's force.
and, furthermore, it's easy to understand why usage rates would eventually go down. When you eliminate illegal sales, you eliminate the incentives and increase the costs of the risks for the worst, most artificially concentrated, and therefore, most addictive forms of the drugs. To take just one example: a rational druggist would have no problems giving you coca leaves if you wanted them. But if he was willing to sell you crack, he would also have to assume the potential liability. No druggist is going to sell you crack, and it will be a cold day in hell anyone ever gets in serious trouble with coca leaves. Making the selling of something illegal vastly distorts the market costs, and usually not toward the side of sanity. We observed exactly this phenomenon with alcohol prohibition. After it stopped, the market for rotgut and hard liquors went into a tailspin--beer and wine are vastly better bang for the buck from a consumer's point of view.