Dazed and Confused: Smoke and Mirrors over Dutch Drug Policy

Collins argues that the Netherlands' lenient drug policy has made it the "narcotics capital of Europe," as if the French or the Germans would never have found any drugs to use without the Dutch. This is not how humans or markets work. EU data on narcotics seizure show supplies of illicit drugs almost everywhere, and the Dutch share thereof has been stable for a decade.

Drug use among Dutch youth, Collins concludes, looks "remarkably similar to the youth drug scene elsewhere in Europe." He seems to think that this similarity damns Dutch drug policy, but it is really praise. Collins is correct: Dutch drug use is indeed not much different from that of most Western societies, including the United States. The Dutch just have less HIV infection, deaths from overdoses, and imprisonment -- and less of almost every type of drug use.

Globalization is fast creating a multicultural world with multiple moralities and multiple lifestyles. One-size-fits-all drug policies are doomed. The Dutch have a rich history of nonabsolutist problem-solving from which many have learned much. But the Dutch are not proselytizing, claiming that they see drug policy's promised land. Neither should those pushing more punitive approaches.

Craig Reinarman is Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and Visiting Scholar at the University of Amsterdam's Center for Drug Research. Peter Cohen is Professor of Social Epidemiology at the University of Amsterdam and Director of its Center for Drug Research.

COLLINS REPLIES

The "informed debate and analysis" that Ambassador Vos calls for also requires an accurate reading of the article in question, something which apparently escaped the ambassador in his perusal of "Holland's Half-Baked Drug Experiment."

I did not write that the Netherlands has twice as many heroin addicts as the United Kingdom; I wrote that the Netherlands has twice as many heroin addicts per capita as the United Kingdom, one of the European countries hardest hit by the heroin scourge. That is hardly a tribute to the effectiveness of a drug policy that is now almost a quarter of a century old -- one of the aims of which was to curb hard-drug use.

The statement that the percentage of THC in Nederwiet could rise as high as 35 percent was indeed incorrect. The real figure, as reported by the Dutch Public Prosecutor's Office, is 40 percent. The prosecutor's report goes on to note that "the harmful effects of this variant can therefore be greater than those of hard drugs."

I did not "report" an increase in cannabis use among Dutch youth. I cited, first, statistics compiled by the Dutch Alcohol and Drug Information Center, which showed a 25 percent increase in the number of people asking for help in dealing with a cannabis problem in 1997, and second, J. A. Wallenberg, the director of the Jellinek Clinic and probably the Netherlands' leading expert in the treatment of addiction of all kinds.

The ambassador wants statistics? The Telegraf, an Amsterdam newspaper, published Dutch Ministry of Justice figures on January 29, 1997, showing that the number of juveniles involved in acts of violence had risen 85 percent in a decade. As I wrote, it was senior police officers in Amsterdam and The Hague -- not me -- who attributed much of that growing juvenile crime problem to persistent soft-drug users. This is due not so much to aggressiveness while the user is under the influence of marijuana but rather to the socially disruptive lifestyles that regular and heavy soft-drug use can produce.

There is no sound statistical basis for the ambassador's statement that "the Dutch people are for the most part satisfied with the result" of Dutch drug policy. No nationwide poll or referendum has ever been taken to determine what percentage of the population approves, disapproves, or is indifferent to the Netherlands' drug policy. One referendum of registered voters was taken on the subject in the Dutch-Belgian border town of Hulst -- admittedly a special case, as the community is regularly invaded by Belgian hash smokers. Still, 96 percent of those polled wanted all the community's drug-selling "coffee shops" closed -- hardly a ringing endorsement of the nation's drug policy.

Finally, the ambassador's letter fails to address the principal thrust of the article -- namely, that the Netherlands' tolerant drug policies have turned his charming country into the drug-dealing capital of Europe.

UP IN SMOKE

The letter from Craig Reinarman and Peter Cohen should be considered in the light of Cohen's statements in the Dutch press advocating the legalization of all drugs, including heroin, LSD, and Ecstasy. The Center for Drug Research, with which both authors are affiliated, is an active champion of such a policy.

In view of Reinarman and Cohen's concern for the statistics published by the government-funded Trimbos Institute, they might wish to contemplate this one, published in the institute's January 14, 1999, Hard Drug Policy Paper: "Drug use is considered to be the primary motivation behind crimes against property."

I did not attribute the "skyrocketing growth in juvenile crime" and "acts of violence" to drug use. The police officers in Amsterdam and The Hague who have to deal with the problem did.