The Flip Side

There Is No `Disaster' When The Sale And Possession Of Cannabis Is Sanctioned By The Law

November 09, 1995|By Stephen Chapman.

AMSTERDAM — Reijer Elzinga is a 43-year-old Dutch entrepreneur, a former hairdresser who now runs a company that sells air cleaning systems and the president of a national trade association.

He is also a drug dealer.

A successful and prosperous one, too. On this autumn evening, we are sitting amid a dozen or so of his customers in a smoky room in the city's canal district. He cheerfully shows me a drawerful of his stock, made up of 24 different kinds of marijuana and hashish. He points out the list of prices on the wall. He is even kind enough to offer me the use of his hash pipe to sample the stuff, on the house.

I decline, but not because I'm afraid of going to jail. All this is taking place with the full knowledge and consent of the authorities. In the Netherlands, the sale and possession of cannabis have been effectively sanctioned by the law for two decades. Americans tend to react with stark, raving terror to the idea of legalizing drugs. They could profit from considering what has happened where it has already been tried.

The storefront in which Elzinga and I are seated is known here as a "coffee house," one of some 1,500 establishments around the country whose main attraction is not coffee. The owners even have an organization, the Union of Cannabis Retailers. These businesses, licensed and regulated by the government, are permitted to sell a customer up to 30 grams of cannabis at a time. Patrons are free to smoke it on the premises or take it home. (They're also free to consume nothing more mind-altering than a soft drink.)

It remains technically illegal to sell or possess marijuana and hashish, but the government has decided that the ban is futile, and that since people are going to use these drugs, it's better to have the business out in the open rather than in the shadows.

The custom of looking the other way doesn't apply only to pot: Dutch police generally don't make arrests for possession of hard drugs, and small-scale drug dealing is ignored as long as it doesn't create a nuisance. The government's enforcement efforts focus almost entirely on major trafficking, particularly from abroad.

From the lurid rhetoric of the American drug war, you would expect the results to be catastrophic: broken families, worsening poverty, rampant crime and violence. And the Netherlands is a scary place. A visitor is in ceaseless mortal peril from runaway bicyclists and second-hand tobacco smoke.

Otherwise, however, Amsterdam is a peaceable, prosperous and orderly metropolis conspicuously lacking the intractable social ills and widespread blight found in American cities. Even after dark, its red-light district feels about as dangerous as Disney World. The homicide rate in the United States is six times higher than in Holland.

The Dutch have learned what Americans have not: Most of the problems associated with drugs stem not from drugs but from laws against drugs, which foster violence and property crime among people involved in the trade--just as Prohibition did.

They have also learned that tolerating drug use doesn't even seem to have any effect on drug use. (This we could have deduced on our own, since alcohol and tobacco have grown less popular with Americans despite being legal.) The percentage of people in the Netherlands who use cannabis in a given month has been stable since 1987, according to scholar Pieter Cohen of the University of Amsterdam; likewise for cocaine.

Pot-smoking is about half as common among Dutch teenagers as it is among American kids. Heroin addiction is less common here than in the U.S. Crack sales are almost unheard of in Holland, and drug-related deaths are rare.

The Dutch system has its unfortunate side effects, like the involvement of organized crime in supplying drugs. But that is not the result of tolerance. It's the result of maintaining enforcement efforts against large suppliers. Elzinga operates in the legal world when he sells cannabis at his three coffee shops, but he has to get his product from people who operate outside the law. Not surprisingly, much of the Dutch cannabis supply comes from uncongenial people with ominous ties to organized crime.

That's no different from the rest of the world. What is different here is that cannabis use has been made a matter of individual choice, to the benefit of law enforcement authorities who are free to worry about serious crime. Hard-liners in the drug war predict disaster if the United States legalizes drugs. So where's the Dutch disaster?