Posted on 01/01/2006 8:11:50 AM PST by Wolfie
Dutch Take Sober Look at Pot Laws
Marijuana can be sold and smoked in the Netherlands, but not grown or shipped. Wider legalization is debated.
Amsterdam -- Paul Wilhelm speaks about marijuana the way a vintner might discuss wine. He talks of aroma, taste and texture, of flowering periods, of the pros and cons of hydroponic cultivation. Wilhelm's connoisseurship might earn him a long prison sentence in the United States, but here in the Netherlands, he's just another taxpaying businessman. He owns a long-established pot emporium - the Dutch call them "coffee shops" - where customers can sidle up to the bar, peruse a detailed menu, and choose from 22 variations of fragrant marijuana and 18 types of potent hash.
Business got even better after Wilhelm's shop, the Dampkring, was featured in 2004 in the film Ocean's Twelve.
And yet life is not as simple for Wilhelm as it is for the pub owner down the street, thanks to the contradictory nature of Holland's famously liberal drug laws. Though the business is duly licensed and regulated, to run it properly he is forced to flout the law on a daily basis. While the Netherlands allows the sale of small amounts of marijuana in coffee shops, it is still illegal to grow marijuana, store it, and transport it in the kind of quantities that any popular shop requires.
Last month, the Dutch parliament began debating a proposal to change that by launching a pilot project to regulate marijuana growing. It was the brainchild of the mayor of Maastricht, a city near the German and Belgian borders that is plagued by gangs of smugglers. Proponents argue that legalizing growing will drive out most of the criminal element and boost responsible purveyors.
"The current policy is schizophrenic," Wilhelm said. "Under the rules, we can only keep 500 grams in the shop at any one time, so that means I have to have more delivered every few hours. And if the delivery guy gets stopped, they take everything, and he gets arrested."
For years, that odd state of affairs seemed to work well, because it allowed the Dutch to tolerate marijuana without having to risk the opprobrium that would come from legalizing it. But organized crime has come to play an increasing role in production, the government has found.
A majority in parliament has come out in favor of the bill to decriminalize growing, reflecting widespread Dutch comfort with a liberal marijuana policy. But the ruling Christian Democratic Party, which has increasingly tightened the rules on coffee shops, opposes it. Analysts expect the government to block implementation even if the measure passes.
"It won't solve anything," said Ivo Hommes, a spokesman for the justice ministry. "You will still have a large amount of people that will grow marijuana for illegal sales and for international export."
Though they consider the bill a good first step, Wilhelm and other coffee-shop owners agree. What they really want is full legalization of cannabis. Polls show that a majority of Dutch support that, but the government says it would run afoul of the international narcotics conventions that the Netherlands and most other nations have signed.
Whatever the fate of the legislation, the Dutch debate underscores a schism in the developed world over how to deal with drug use.
Even as the United States continues to spend tens of billions of dollars each year fighting a war on drugs that lately has included an increasing number of marijuana arrests, much of Europe and Canada have instead opted to treat drug use as a public-health problem.
While no country has gone as far as the Netherlands and allowed open sales of marijuana, in most of Europe possession of small amounts of cannabis, and even cocaine and heroin, merits only a fine. And penalties for drug dealing are far lower than in the United States.
Rejecting the approach that has filled America's jails with nonviolent drug offenders, Europeans and Canadians have embraced the concept of "harm reduction," which argues that illegal drug use is impossible to stamp out, and therefore the best public policy is to minimize the damage to society.
A central tenet of this approach is giving out clean needles to drug addicts to prevent the spread of HIV - something that remains controversial in the United States but is common in Europe and Canada.
But it goes further: Several countries allow government-funded "consumption rooms" for drug users, to provide them with social services and dissuade them from using drugs on the street. And at least four countries - Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain - have programs under which the government gives heroin to hard-core addicts and lets them inject themselves in a government-sponsored facility.
That idea is profoundly controversial, but the Swiss, who pioneered the practice a decade ago, insist that it has dramatically reduced drug deaths and street crime by addict participants, who no longer have to steal or mug to feed their habits.
Antonio Costa, an Italian who heads the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime in Vienna, has little patience for Europe's tolerant stance, which he believes is behind a recent upswing in cocaine use in the region. While overall European drug use has never been as high as that in the United States, American rates have been falling while European rates have been rising.
Many other Europeans, though, shake their heads at what they consider a moralistic, absolutist mind-set among America's drug warriors.
It's not that there is no common ground: Even the Dutch arrest drug smugglers (including marijuana traffickers), and in July the Dutch government signed a cooperation agreement with Washington.
But the Dutch coffee-shop policy is grounded in a belief that is anathema to American drug enforcers: that cannabis is no more harmful than alcohol. Dutch experts argue that this remains true even though much of the marijuana grown these days is far more potent than the kind smoked by the flower children of the 1960s.
American officials have long sought to discredit Europe's more liberal drug policies, and the Dutch experience in particular - sometimes with a selective use of statistics.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, for example, takes aim in an anti-legalization paper on its Web site under a subheading, "Europe's More Liberal Drug Policies Are Not the Right Model for America."
The agency points out that from 1984 to 1996, marijuana use doubled among 18- to 25-year-olds in Holland. What it doesn't say is that marijuana use in the Netherlands has been stable since then, and it remains lower than in the United States, which has seen use rise from a low in 1992.
Indeed, 30 years after the Netherlands began allowing open marijuana sales, only about 3 percent of the Dutch population - or 408,000 people - use marijuana in a given year, compared with 8.6 percent - or 25.5 million - Americans, according to the most authoritative surveys by both governments.
Dutch health officials say there is no evidence that the country's tolerant marijuana policy encourages use of harder drugs, which here is about average compared with the rest of Europe, and far lower than in the United States. To the contrary, proponents argue, the policy is designed to separate hard drugs from soft, because coffee shops found selling hard drugs are shut down.
In the United States, meanwhile, the war on drugs has increasingly become a war on pot.
A study of FBI data released last year by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing Project, found that between 1992 and 2002, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent of all drug arrests to 45 percent, while the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases dropped from 55 percent of all drug arrests to less than 30 percent.
The rationale behind such a crackdown mystifies Dutch cannabis aficionados such as Wilhelm. He doesn't argue that marijuana is harmless. But he sees every day that it can be enjoyed recreationally and responsibly, just like alcohol.
"I've got three daughters, and I want to know that if they do try marijuana, they're not going to get it where someone is going to offer them some cocaine or an ecstasy pill," Wilhelm said. "I don't say that marijuana is healthy, but it's there. You can't close your eyes and think that if you lock everybody up, it's going to disappear."
Maybe Abraham Lincoln said it best, "The Constitution was not meant to be a suicide pact".
"You are ignoring the issue IMO."
The issues we're addressing are different, best I can tell. You're looking at this as a drug issue, and I a constitutional issue, therefor we have a failure to communicate.
"It is more important to have one policy on the Federal level that works in all states than 50 policies, one for every state."
Then do it the right way and amend the constitution.
"The enemies that would bring drugs to us or would make drugs among us would use the various policies of 50 separate states against us as a weapon."
I don't think it would be any worse than any other crime that crosses state lines, and once it crosses it's within the federal powers to act. The states do most of the work anyway, and if a state wants to legalize then that's one less state the fed has to worry with.
"We need Federal control and enforcement. It is like having no Gorelick wall between the states."
I don't think this would be the issue you claim, when the states have crime that's crossing the state line they go to the fed now.
"Like I said, this is a survival issue as the terrorism issue is. This is not a Constitutional issue when we are dealing with a threat at the national level it is."
Then all the more reason to keep the fed busy at the border, no telling what's coming in at this point. As for the constitutional aspect, anytime the fed exerts power over the states you bet it's a constitutional issue.
My honest opinion seeing how you're a CA Guy, me thinks you want the fed to save you from your states voters. Any truth in that statement?
01
No no no. We want potential jihadists to smoke as much pot as possible. They will then be much too stoned, man, to catch their planes.
"The Federal drug laws won't shift that much from President to President."
And here is where we are stuck, it's not the federal "drug" law, it's the exercise of federal power that is not enumerated in the constitution. You can replace the word DRUG something else and if it's not enumerated in the constitution I have a problem with the fed using its power.
01
Nobody cared about pot till well into the 20th century.
The Constitution was never meant to be a suicide pact, so I have no problem with the Feds exercising it's power regarding drug laws that the people's representatives wrote into law after the people voted them in.
The enemies would use the weak states with liberal laws against the whole nation, so there has to be the Federal power with one minimum standard for all.
We can not operate in the states like the Gorelick wall did between the CIA and FBI, we would be destroying ourselves to the delight of other nations that hate us.
It is OK to have laws beyond the minimal standards of the Feds in the states, but the Feds should maintain a minimum law for our survival.
Gotcha.
Wait till 51% decides not to 'protect' your right to worship as you wish, or speak your mind (what little you have) or own guns, or vote....
L
In other words, changing attitudes?
I believe only Hawaii initiated decriminalization in the legislature -- all others states were via voter referendum. You favor pure democracy?
No, I don't, but voter referenda are probably a better indicator of those changing attitudes than a vote in the legislature.
Well you can stop screaming. As I demonstrated to you (without rebuttal, I might add), drug use is relatively flat. Any increase in spending is due to the increase in population.
I wouldn't try to rebut and in fact in my first post to you on this thread I also said that drug use was relatively flat. Federal spending though is up from what it was in the seventies and that's on a per capita basis.
Keep in mind, half the federal ONDCP budget goes to anti-drug advertising, education, and drug treatment.
I'm think the only reason they can claim this is because of some budget trickery, but I can't find a link right now and I'm tired. Maybe tomorrow.
Unlike other illegal drugs, marijuana mellows a person out, and I think of all the people with high-stress jobs that smoke marijuana, on their off-work hours, to mellow out instead of going postal and killing all their coworkers.
Just think about it.
And no, I am not on anything.
Amending the constitution will take more than that.
An uninformed, knee-jerk attitude, led by activists and motivated voters (ie., dope smoking druggies) spewing propaganda, dutifully reported by the biased press.
Not a way to run a country.
Where do you get your "facts"?
Where do you get your facts? Reliable source Please?
L
That's what I'd like to know.
Some of it from here.
"With a record-setting 2 million people locked up in American jails and prisons, the United States has overtaken Russia and has a higher percentage of its citizens behind bars than any other country."
"In 1980, says Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Sentencing Project in Washington, about 40,000 Americans were locked up solely for drug offenses. Now the number is 450,000, three-fourths of them black or Hispanic, although drug use is no higher in those groups than among whites."
Also, from here, indicating that only 28% of state inmates were charged with possession. But, I would venture to guess that most of those possession cases were actually drug dealing, and plea-bargained down.
Also, I would guress that almost all of the federal drug prisoners are there for dealing.
We have simply decided not to protect your right to do recreational drugs.
The only rights we have to protect are those we said we would protect. You can find those protections in your federal and state constitutions.
Now, are those ALL your rights? Nope. They're just the ones we've decided, as a society, to protect.
Reality
9th Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Paulsen attempts to 'clarify' his previous statement:
I didn't say the constitutions were a source of rights. I said the constitutions listed the protections of rights.
Obviously, neither U.S. nor State Constitutions can list them all.
Paulsen, your skewed vision of what our Constitution actually says is becoming truly bizarre..
Where do you get these strange ideas that some of our inalienable rights to life, liberty or property are NOT protected by our Constitution?
Who gets to decide to protect which rights?
Where exactly is this vision of yours written into our Constitution?
I believe that's correct. (And today most Nevada counties regulate but don't criminalize the victimless 'crime' of prostitution.)
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