MYTH OF THE DRUGS UTOPIA

Last week, a report urged the relaxation of Britain's drugs laws and cited
Holland's easy-going regime as the way forward. We sent a writer to
Amsterdam where she uncovered the sordid reality of this liberal dream...

The door of the Grasshopper coffee shop in Amsterdam creaks open, and the
fresh-faced patrons stare up through the smoke. Some are smiling, orthers
murmur earnestly, and one boy is clutching his head in his hands over a
wooden table.

'He's had the White Widow,' confides a seasoned onlooker, referring to a
particularly potent new brand of skunk weed. 'Takes a bit of getting used to.'

At first glance, the scene seems almost quaint. Here are young people
sharing cannabis joints, sipping milky cups of tea, listening to reggae on
the juke box and discussing world peace. The policemen at the station over
the road do not bat an eyelid.

This is the liberal and beguiling face of Holland's 'blind eye' drugs
policy. There are hundreds of similar coffee shops across the city, where
drug-users can smoke without fear of prosecution in the simple belief that
tolerance, not prohibition, is the answer.

It is also the system warmly praised in the recent report by Viscountess
Runciman, which caned for a more liberal and radical approach to drugs in
Britain. Her panel argues that these people will smoke a spliff anyway, so
far better let them do it in safety.

LIBERALS in Amsterdam are well rehearsed in these arguments: If you make
soft drugs legal, you protect users from the worst aspects of 'narcocrime',
including dealers who might lead them to the far more evil 'hard' drugs,
like cocaine and heroin.

But after more than 15 years of experimenting, is Holland really the way
ahead? Or are the cracks in the liberal drugs dream beginning to show, with
disastrous consequences?

The simple fact is that the Dutch are losing confidence in their own
system, just as our policy-makers are considering taking it on.

Despite claims that heroin use has fallen, that drug deaths are low and
that violence and drug-related crime have dropped, the use of cocaine and
Ecstasy among young people has risen to the highest in Europe. Heroin use
among teenagers is still the third highest.

Holland is also fighting its newfound image as the 'drug pusher of Europe'.
The 'blind eye' approach has made it a haven for pushers and suppliers.

More than 80 % of the heroin smuggled into Britain is believed to have come
through Holland, and 87 % of the Ecstasy that comes here is Dutch. There
are more Dutch drugs here than cheeses. Under pressure from its European
neighbours, the Dutch government is now asking: has it all gone horribly wrong?

Behind the veneer of liberalism is a much darker picture of confused law,
disastrous loopholes and hypocrisy. Most disturbing of all is the way the
soft and hard drug markets have merged again.

The supposed division between them, quoted in the Runciman report, is as
illusory as the cheerful smiles of the prostitutes in the neon-lit windows
of Amsterdam.

Darkness descends over Amsterdam and the coffee shops between the red light
district and the university begin to fill up. Inside, the signs are clear
for all to see: 'No hard drugs here.'

But outside, the dealers sidle up to you on the tiny streets and discreetly
elbow you as you pass, hissing 'Ecstasy, cocaine, crack' under their
breath, like a mantra. 'Can I get you something?' One whispers, with a
faint, salesman smile.

'Like what?' you ask. 'Anything, he says. 'I can get you anything you like.'

BY 11 AM the following morning, a steady flow of tourists are making their
way into the Rijksmuseum. The clean, white van parked outside with a
security camera on the roof, goes unnoticed by most. But this is a very
different side of drugs in the city.

This is the mobile methadone clinic for the most desperate addicts. They
press the buzzer and shuffle in through the electric door at one end. Then
they show their face to the nurses behind the glass screen, take a white
paper cup, knock back their methadone ration and exit at the other end.

There is no interval. One after another they come, young and old, male and
female.

Their faces are ravaged and gaunt, their eyes are heavy-lidded and
lifeless. And despite the government statistics that suggest the average
age of heroin users in the city is 41, many are clearly at least a decade
younger than that.

David Dimon peers out from beneath a woolly hat. Aged 30, he has been a
drug user for 16 years and dependent on hard drugs, cocaine and then
heroin, for eight years. His story is typical.

When he was 14, around the time Holland was relaxing its drug laws and the
first coffee shops were opening, he began smoking marijuana. He quickly
became 'hooked' and by his late teens was smoking from 'morning till night'.

In the clubs in Amsterdam he was offered cocaine. While cannabis made him a
'zombie', coke made him high. He was also able to function on it. His
friends thought he had kicked his old habit, not taken on a new one.

From cocaine he graduated to heroin, smoking both drugs in ever-increasing
amounts, and spending 300 to 400 guilders a day on them. First he gave up
his university studies in psychology, then he lost his job and, before he
knew it, eight years of his life.

'It's laughable the policy here,' he says. 'At one end they make it very
easy for you to take drugs and tell you it's fine. By the time you reach
the other end, youre an outcast and they don't want to know you any more.

'Of course, being able to smoke drugs made it easy to move on to harder
drugs. It's a first step. It's like walking, then driving and then getting
a car of your own. It's a progression. I'm not saying that happens to
everyone, but it happens to enough.'

AS WE jump onto a tram heading out towards the suburbs, he starts to become
dreamy and vague. The methadone is working.

He does not regard it as a substitute for heroin, he explains, just another
drug to top him up.

He and his friend Max, who has used drugs for 17 years, are on the way to a
special place on the bland housing estate of low-rise flats where they can
get free breakfast and where Max can smoke his crack pipe without anyone
trying to stop him.

They point in the direction of the Jellinek clinic in Amsterdam, where
7,500 patients are treated every year for addictions. After alcoholism, the
biggest addiction is heroin.

David and Max dismiss the idea that drugs-related crime is low in
Amsterdam. Even the endless racks of bicycles in the city are locked up
these days. The battered ones may be worth only 25 guilders, but for the
desperate junkie that is enough for a hit.

'There's such hypocrisy here over drugs,' says David. 'Now if you're a
criminal you get help. You are given a special place to take your drugs. A
policeman laughed at me the other day and said "You're a junkie who doesn't
steal. You must be stupid".'

The argument that a tolerant drug policy would reduce demand for illegal
drugs and drug-related crime becomes depressingly unconvincing, while
talking to David.

He can buy heroin in the red light district for around 100 guilders a gram,
he explains, less if you find the right dealer. But in the suburb of
Bijlmermeer, the so-called ghetto of Amsterdam, it is even cheaper: 40
guilders.

Here, among the soulless blocks of flats, dealers lurk in the shadows of
the concrete car parks all day, waiting for business. They are not
surprised to see strangers. Outsiders still risk the trip to buy drugs at
bargain prices. 'Either you buy or you go,' grunts a man and gestures for
us to leave.

NO PLACE better sums up the mixed messages on drugs in Holland than the
Bureau De Loor. The discreet office in the centre of Amsterdam is manned by
two drugs experts, who offer a 'safe-house' testing facility for the
thousands of Ecstasy tablets being bought and sold in Amsterdam every day.

They do not ask the visitors who they are, whether they are dealers or
individuals. They simply perform a test on a sample of a pill they have
brought, tell them what it contains and how safe it is.

As a general rule if it is Ecstasy or MDMA then it will turn blue. If it is
speed it will turn orange and if does not turn any colour at all, it is
thrown in the bin. Too risky.

The bureau also offers a safe house service at raves around the city, for
the thousands of young clubbers. Like the Runciman panel, they believe that
young people will take Ecstasy anyway, so it is better to offer protection.

The bureau was set up by August De Loor, a drugs aficionado and youth
worker who talks in grandiose language about the social importance of
drugs. The police love him, he insists, because he helps create an
atmosphere of safety; the doctors love him because he helps them protect
the users; and of course the kids love him.

SURELY there was never a more confusing message than this about the risk of
drugs for teenagers on the club scene. One Dutch public prosecutor, Hans
Pieters, has described it as nonsensical. 'The police lab takes two weeks
to test these drugs properly,' he said recently. 'The tests create an
atmosphere of legality and reliability they cannot deliver.'

But Mr De Loor is infuriated by a new campaign in which the Dutch
government is warning young people against using Ecstasy. Three weeks ago
it launched adverts that insisted just one pill is enough to kill you and
that users should not be fooled into thinking they were safe taking these
tablets.

Ecstasy, perhaps more than any other drug, has embarrassed the Dutch
government into action. The Netherlands is Europe's biggest producer of
Ecstasy, and Amsterdam's tolerance policy has turned it into a virtual free
port for the drug.

The southern Dutch province of Noor-Brabant, once renowned for its bootleg,
gin and its amphetamines in the Sixties, is now home to Ecstasy factories.
Pig farmers and mushroom growers, in financial difficulties, have been
renting out sheds to producers.

The government set up special undercover teams to chase out the Ecstasy
gangs. But, according to Mr De Loor, the government crackdown has made it
harder for the suppliers to produce good Ecstasy. As a result, the users
are either taking more pills, four instead of one, or moving on to
low-grade speed.

'Because of the image of Holland as the Colombia of Ecstasy, the government
has started this so-called war,' says Mr De Loor. 'But all it has done is
reduce the quality of the Ecstasy because it's harder to produce it now.
The consumers still want it, so they will still look for it. But they end
up taking junkie speed instead.'

It is a stark illustration of how, if you create a blind eye policy and
make a drug almost legal without the state controlling the supply, you are
set for disaster. But why should Ecstasy be quasi-legal anyway? It is a
potentially lethal drug of which the long-term dangers are still not known.

In the measured words of Scotland Yard's new commissioner, Sir John
Stevens, who does not share the Runciman report's enthusiasm for the Dutch
model: 'You've got to be careful about legalising things, just because you
don't think what you're doing is successful.'

ON THE way back to the Grasshopper coffee shop, the liberal world of White
Widow skunk and idealistic young smokers no longer seems quite so quaint or
innocent.

An announcement on the radio that the government wants to control the type
of cannabis being smoked in coffee shops and restrict it to plants grown in
the Netherlands is a sign of the times. This is a bid to stop the flood of
illegal drugs and get back some state control.

It is clear, talking to policy makers here, who only want to chat openly
off the record, that the dream is over. No one has the heart for it any
more. One senior figure smiled ironically at the notion that their British
counterparts were keen to get liberal just as the Dutch were starting to
face up to the fall-out in Holland.

'For every problem that the blind eye approach has solved, it has created
another problem,' he said. 'With tolerance was supposed to come control.
But those controlling the drugs world for their own ends are not liberals,
they are opportunists who will exploit any loophole they can.

'You cannot have these policies in isolation, because it just makes you a
magnet for the unscrupulous. And by making the drug legal, or at least
tolerated, you have to control the supply as well. We created a legal
demand for an illegal substance. The result is disaster.'

Here in Holland, you do not have to look far beyond the smiling images of
young people smoking joints and dropping Es at raves to see the ravages.
The government is now opening user rooms' across the city to keep the most
hardened addicts off the streets. There can be no greater admission of failure.

They sit in hopeless groups, folding their foil and cutting out their drugs
in a macabre parody of the coffee shops. Sometimes the police pop In for a
chat. At 6 pm the room closes and they disappear again into a hinterland of
hard drug abuse and despair.

BACK at the Grasshopper coffee shop, a group of 21year-old British students
are smoking skunk. Their eyes are glazed and heavy-lidded. One looks a
little pale and another is grinning.

Yes it was fun they insisted, and rather strange smoking in broad daylight
in full view of a police station. But even after a few days in Amsterdam,
they too were asking how high a price there was to pay for liberalism and
drugs.

'You wander along the streets and see all the crackheads,' says one
business studies student. 'They look terrible, really desperate, and you
wonder how they got there. It's rather frightening.

'I wouldn't want to see that in London. It made me feel very uncomfortable.
I wouldn't want that for the city where I live. It's not worth it.'