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Dutch drug policy: Soft or hard?
Bart
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10/2/2005 8:46:03 PM
Under Dutch penal law there exists the so-called 'principle of opportunity'.
The Dutch drug policy is in my opinion a sensible one, although at the same time it’s a weird policy. Soft drugs are tolerated, that means: it's technically still against the law, but the police simply "look the other way" and won't arrest you for smoking or possession. We have so called coffee shops, most of them hardly sell any coffee though. They sell weed and hash. They are permitted to sell up 5 grams to anyone over 18. But, and here comes the weird part, they are NOT allowed to buy weed from growers or dealers. They have to tiptoe the weed in through the back door, and then they can sell it candidly through the front door.
Under Dutch penal law there exists the so called principle of opportunity. This means that the state prosecution can skip prosecute punishable deeds if there’s a higher public interest is being served with it. The interest being served with this tolerating policy, is differentiating between soft and hard drugs and the public order.
According to the guidelines of the Ministry of Justice of January 1 2001, the sale of cannabis in coffeeshops isn’t being prosecuted if the following criteria are met:
• No more than 5 grams can be sold to a customer per day.
• Hard drugs are not allowed (XTC as well).
• Advertising isn’t allowed
• There should be no nuisance caused by the sale in the surroundings of the coffeeshop.
• Minors aren’t allowed in the coffeeshops.
• Coffeeshops are allowed to have a 500 gram stock.
Legally, the sale of cannabis remains prohibited. As long as coffeeshop entrepreneurs abide by the previously mentioned rules, there won’t be taken legal action against them. To avoid public nuisance, municipalities can set additional criteria for the coffeeshops.
Under its policy, the sale and use of Marijuana and Hashish isn’t punishable as long as these places abide by strict government set guidelines. The policy has also lowered the level of priority police place upon enforcing minor drug possession violations. While the Dutch Drug Policy decriminalizes the use of soft drugs in these two ways, it maintains tough policies against their import and export across its borders, comparable to what is found in other countries.
The chief rationale the Dutch have made these adjustments to their drug policies are to provide people a non-criminal environment in which they can conduct experiments with softer, non-physically addictive drugs. Through this provision, people who wish to try soft drugs can do so without getting involved with illegal drug trades. Ideally, the policy prevents people from trying potentially worse criminal activities and keep them from circumstances that might advance addictions to harder, more physically addictive drugs like heroin or cocaine.
For the most part, the Dutch Drug Policy seems to work. Many surveys have been made that indicate the percentage of Dutch soft drug users is about the same as in other European countries.
Criticizers of the Dutch drug policy often claim that the threshold to explore harder drugs is lowered as soon as soft drugs are freely available. The following numbers clearly indicate that following years of without restraint available soft drugs, the usage of hard drugs still is low when compared to other European countries:
The United States too have been a huge criticizer of the Dutch model. They even declared the War on Drugs; the goof of all times, a cosmic gag reel. Especially the anti drug czar Gen. McCaffrey took a wild swing at the Dutch, sadly enough for him, he used false figures to back his assertions. McCaffrey claimed that the Dutch murder rate was more than twice that of America's. He further alleged that three times as many Dutch youth admit trying marijuana than do their U.S. counterparts. McCaffrey said that liberal drug policies were to blame for the higher Dutch figures. In fact, however, both Dutch homicide rates and prevalence of youth marijuana use are far lower than those in America. Which approach is more successful? Well, just take a look at the figures:
Still, soft drugs aren’t completely legalized in The Netherlands. The reason for this is the lack of guts of our government. They don't want to legalize completely, because they're afraid of the reactions of our neighbours, like Germany, Belgium but especially France. Also there are certain agreements between the countries of the EU that make a complete legalization difficult.
On June 27th, 2000, a motion ( a desire of parliament)was accepted to decriminalize the supply of coffeeshops (72 votes against, 73 for) but the minister of Justice decided nevertheless that it wasn't a good idea (for it would imply an actual total legalization of soft drugs in The Netherlands), so nothing changed. A missed chance perhaps. But, this was a start, one day it will be totally legal.
Photo courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service
About the author: This author’s contributions might come across as somewhat double-dutch; please don’t blame him for it, he can’t help himself.
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