NETHERLANDS SWIMS AGAINST THE DRUG TIDE

LOOKING THE OTHER WAY

By not punishing soft-drug use, the Dutch have avoided a lot of trouble.
First of a two-part series.

Amsterdam -- THE proprietor of the Machu Picchu coffee shop was cordial
enough as he uncapped a fruit drink and fished a fat joint of homegrown
Superskunk from a glass jar.

But when asked how the smorgasbord of marijuana and hashish finds its way
to his brightly decorated little emporium overlooking the Amstel River, the
man's face darkened. "Ah. That's the undiscussed part."

So it is. In the Netherlands, the peculiar legal status of the 1,200-plus
cannabis outlets allows them to sell the drugs in small amounts, but not to
buy them.

Pressure is building in a number of countries not just to decriminalize
marijuana, but also to reappraise the huge fiscal and social costs of the
U.S.-led "war on drugs." Drug use has been thrust into the spotlight.

There were more cheers than boos when Olympic snowboarder and sometime
pot-smoker Ross Rebagliati regained his Nagano Olympic medal in February,
after briefly losing it. In California and Arizona, to the dismay of
Washington, voters have approved initiatives to legalize marijuana in cases
of medical need. In Canada, several Canadians have gone directly to the
police and the courts in the last two years to challenge what they say are
the country's anachronistic drug laws.

Critics of the status quo often look to the Netherlands, and elsewhere in
Europe, where drug abuse is viewed primarily as a medical and social
problem, rather than a criminal one.

But in Europe's most drug-tolerant nation, what is called the "back-door
problem" -- the source of supply -- speaks volumes.

Marijuana has never been decriminalized in the Netherlands. It has merely
been depenalized through non-enforcement of the law against simple
possession. Most Dutch seem content with that state of limbo. Outright
legalization looks to be as far off as ever.

It is not that the bold experiment has failed. Since the country's Opium
Act was rewritten 22 years ago, drugs have been divided into two
categories, dangerous and less dangerous. That has permitted the coffee
shops to flourish, along with outlets for organic stimulants such as peyote
and psychedelic mushrooms. Penalties for trafficking in heroin, cocaine and
amphetamines, meanwhile, have increased sharply.

The result? Hard-drug usage by the Netherlands' 15 million residents is
among the lowest in the Western world. Pot-smoking, too, appears far less
prevalent than previously thought, new data indicate.

"Few people believe it, but higher availability of drugs doesn't lead to
higher use, and I'm talking about all drugs," said Tim Boekhout Van Solinge
of the University of Amsterdam's Centre for Drug Research.

Politics, however, is another matter. It is one thing to turn a blind eye,
in the Dutch tradition of gedoogbeleid , meaning institutional discretion.
But it is quite another to disregard international statutes and codify a
policy that in some quarters of Europe is regarded as radical.

"Right now, legalization is not possible. We'd have a lot of problems,"
Amsterdam police spokesman Klaas Wilting said.

For one thing, the Netherlands would become even more of a magnet for
smokers and dealers than it already is. For another, conflicting priorities
would bedevil co-operation with foreign police agencies.

"The Netherlands is only a small country," Mr. Wilting said. "I think you
can only legalize when other countries want to do it, too."

There have been plenty of signals that some would like to do just that. Yet
in an era in which the United Nations estimates the drug trade to be worth
a record $567.6-billion annually, comprising a staggering 8 per cent of all
global economic activity, a powerful current of intolerance tugs the other
way.

Much of Europe is aghast at the unforgiving U.S. approach. (There are
currently 400,000 Americans imprisoned for drugs, compared to 15,000 in
1980.) At the same time, many of its politicians still perceive the
Netherlands and its giant port of Rotterdam, the world's busiest, as a
sinister gateway for Europe's drugs.

There are also loud complaints about drugs that originate in the
Netherlands, rather than pass through it. The huge Dutch-grown marijuana
industry, whose potent hydroponically grown product comes courtesy of an
estimated 35,000 farmers, accounts for about two-thirds of coffee-shop
sales. Its crop is also exported.

Another worry is the amphetamine-based "designer drug" ecstasy, of which
renegade Dutch chemists are Europe's major producer, even as domestic
ecstasy consumption seems to be dropping.

Anti-Netherlands rhetoric peaked in 1996 after French President Jacques
Chirac threatened to scrap the Schengen Agreement, allowing unfettered
movement across Europe's borders, amid charges that Holland had become a
"narco state."

"The political discussion has cooled down since then, a lot of things have
happened," said Dutch foreign ministry spokesman Jack Twiss.

Those changes include a largely symbolic reduction in how much cannabis can
be purchased (five grams at a time, down from 30 grams), the shutdown of
dozens of coffee shops violating the rules, and a wave of crackdowns on big
drug gangs.

Yet foreign unease lingers, notably in France, Germany, Sweden and, most
recently, Britain, whose illicit drug consumption is the highest in Europe.
("I do not recognize the term 'soft drug,' " Home Secretary Jack Straw
remarked recently.)

Add to that the perennial dismay in Washington about marijuana.

Domestic pressures, too, are tilting against Dutch legalization. An
election is set for May, and the conservative Christian Democrats are in
the ascendant.

All of which leaves Dutch authorities in a distinctly odd spot.

Even as Mr. Wilting's police colleagues cheerfully direct you to the
nearest coffee shop, other officers are vigorously pursuing the importers,
dealers and large-scale growers. Or at least some of them.

For the coffee shops, which are taxed on their sales, the rules are clear:
No one under 18, no advertising, no trouble, and, above all, no hard drugs.

"The coffee shops are strictly controlled by the police," Mr. Wilting said
firmly. "If there is a disturbance, or selling of hard drugs or stolen
goods, we report this to the mayor and he closes the coffee shop."

But what that control really amounts to, others suggest, is a form of
selective law enforcement.

Along with the hard drugs that are their priority, Dutch authorities each
year intercept hundreds of tonnes of hashish and marijuana. In 1995, the
net haul of soft drugs comprised 44 per cent of the total intercepted
within the 15-member European Union.

Several hundred domestic growers have their crops seized each year, too,
and some are fined.

"Most of the dealers have difficulties with the cops," said the counter man
at the Border Line coffee shop, deftly shovelling $20 worth of sticky Rough
Bush into a plastic bag.

Yet there is no escaping the fact that those mountains of hashish and
marijuana keep on coming. Two years ago, coffee-shop sales were estimated
at about $709.5-million annually.

"Some of the big cannabis dealers they let operate, some they don't,"
explained Carolien Van Milst, 30, a long-time heroin and crack addict and
veteran of the Amsterdam drug scene. "People the police can use, who have
information they want, don't get hassled."

This uneven landscape prompted the national council of Dutch police chiefs
to recommend last year that cannabis be decriminalized, period.

But who would be the supplier? There is a long-time consensus that it would
have to be the state. Turn it over to market forces such as the tobacco
companies, the argument goes, and there will be more drug use, not less.

"This is all very confusing, but the thing about our drug policy is that it
works," said political-science student Ellen Hoogakker, 29.

"Our experience over the last 20 years has been profound, and when we look
around, we see that almost everywhere in the world is worse than Holland.
We're stubborn and quite proud of our drug policy. There's a lot of moral
humbug in other countries."

Ms. Van Milst, the addict, offers more anecdotal proof that the Dutch have
succeeded in their core goal of driving a wedge between hard and soft drugs.

"Everybody who smokes marijuana is very against hard drugs, the soft-drugs
people will have nothing to do with people like us," she said, inhaling
pipe after pipe of crack cocaine in her bleak little apartment.

"Heroin is regarded as the losers' drug, almost no young people are
attracted by it even though it's available at low prices," concurred Mr.
Boekhout Van Solinge.

"We are a very pragmatic society. And if the Dutch drug policy had had all
the negative effects that they sometimes say, in the United States and
France . . . that policy would have been changed by now. I mean, this is
not a religion."

Still, the anticannabis sentiment remains alive and well.

In February it was disclosed that the World Health Organization in Geneva
had excised part of a long-awaited drug analysis that concluded that
cannabis is less hazardous than tobacco or alcohol.

If, as many allege, the omission resulted from pressure by the U.S.
National Institute on Drug Abuse and the UN's International Drug Control
Program, few drug experts in the Netherlands would be surprised. Similarly
awkward data have slipped down the cracks before.

But while most of those experts stress that what works at home might not
work elsewhere, the Dutch leniency seems to have paid off.

"We succeeded in making pot boring," former Dutch drug czar Eddy Engelsman
remarked a few years ago, and he may have been right.

"Dutch kids, yeah, they smoke and go to coffee shops, but they grow over
it," said a waitress in the smoky Coffee Shop 36 in Amsterdam's red-light
district, setting down a $4 mug of mind-addling Chocolate Grass Milk. "I
grew over it."

Dutch high-school students' math and science marks, meanwhile, remain among
the highest in the world.

Surveys within 11 U.S. states that reduced small-scale marijuana possession
to a misdemeanour in the 1970s drew a similar conclusion: Looser laws
almost certainly spur greater short-term usage, but there is no proof that
most dabblers become chronic potheads or abusers of hard drugs.

Only now is a national Dutch survey being completed. When it is,
statistician Marieke Langemeijer predicts the number of people who admit to
having smoked pot within the previous month will range from 250,000 to
400,000 -- about half of what had been thought.

Dealers in all kinds of drugs still abound in the Amsterdam core, and
legions of foreign narco-tourists still flood in to smoke their brains out
in dimly lit venues in Amsterdam and in some Dutch border cities.

Yet less than 3 per cent of the total Dutch population appears to be
regular cannabis users, according to new estimates by the drug-research
centre.

The Conscious Dreams store on central Warmoes street is one of scores of
"smart shops" that sell peyote buttons and other psychoactive substances,
along with an array of horticultural equipment.

Just up the block is the local police station, where cops sip coffee and
stare into computer screens, looking as bored as the nearby prostitutes in
their red-lit windows.

At the giant "raves" on the outskirts of the city, arriving partygoers are
liable to be stopped by police and searched for the ecstasy and other
stimulants that are the festivities' staple. But once inside, a
government-sanctioned chemist will test the purity of those pills.

It all might resemble a recipe for social collapse. But Amsterdam now,
where crime has dropped 25 per cent in the past five years, is a far cry
from Amsterdam in the early 1970s, when the city was the hippy capital of
Europe, and armies of stoned junkies were trashing the now-pristine Vondel
Park.

"We're not saying our model is the one for the whole world, that's absolute
nonsense; it's the model for the Netherlands," Mr. Twiss concluded. "But
you can learn from each other by listening to each other."

MONDAY: CANADA'S BATTLE OVER POT

[Sidebar#1]

What the numbers say

Do liberal drug laws encourage abuse? In the case of the Netherlands, it
appears not.

A national drug-use survey currently being assembled, the first of its kind
in the Netherlands, is expected to conclude that about 14 per cent of Dutch
citizens 12 and older have used cannabis.

Previous estimates have been much higher. But these are now thought to have
been badly skewed by the heavy concentration of young adults, artists and
other free thinkers in Amsterdam, where 30 per cent of teen and adult
residents admit to having smoked pot at some time.

That 14-per-cent figure compares with a slightly differently based Canadian
statistic of 23 per cent, drawn from 1994 surveys of residents 15 or older
by Ontario's Addiction Research Foundation and Ottawa's Canadian Centre on
Substance Abuse.

But the Canadian numbers are probably higher now.

After years of decline, recreational cannabis usage among teen-aged
students in Ontario has more than doubled. In 1991, 12 per cent admitted
using the drug at least once in the previous year, while the 1997 figure
was 25 per cent.

A similar surge was seen elsewhere, most notably the United States and the
United Kingdom.

As for hard drugs, the Netherlands has a rate of 1.6 heroin and cocaine
addicts per 1,000 population -- unchanged for more than a decade. That
compares with a figure of about three on Britain, seven in Switzerland and
10 in the United States.

A canadian statistic is elusive: Both Health Minister Allan Rock's office
and Health Canada say they do not know how many Canadians regularly abuse
heroin and cocaine.

Using CCSA data, an estimate of about two per 1,000 emerges. The CCSA
cautions, however, that because the methodology is based on telephone
interviews, the real figure may be higher. Two years ago, Maclean's magazin
cited a figure of seven addicts per 1,000 population.

- -- Staff

[Sidebar #2]

Drugs and the Dutch

The Netherlands revamping of its Opium Act in 1976, spurred by a heroin
epidemic and two national commissions, did not give the green light for
cannabis-selling coffee shops to open everywhere.

Rather, it authorized local authorities to permit such outlets if they
wished. Most have said yes. A couple of municipalities operate their own.

This state-level tolerance is unusual, but not unique:

- -- Spain depenalized cannabis use in 1983.

- -- So too have three Australian jurisdictions.

- -- In several German states, a 1994 federal court ruling has meant that
prosecution for small amounts of cannabis is now rare.

- -- Two years ago, Luxembourg's parliament called for the adoption of
Dutch-style drug policies in all three Benelux countries (Luxembourg,
Belgium and the Netherlands).

- -- The Belgian government is considering a modest form of decriminalization.

- -- Last weekend in London, thousands of marchers staged the largest
pro-cannabis rally ever seen in the United Kingdom.

- -- The European Commission is weighing the merits of a task-force proposal
urging the toleration of marijuana for medical use.

- -- In the United States, by contrast, national policy is leaning heavily
the other way.

In a new survey of 229 cannabis-using teenagers referred for treatment by
social-service or criminal-justice agencies, researchers found that more
than two-thirds complained of withdrawal symptoms if they ceased smoking.

The study, paid for by the strongly antimarijuana National Institute on
Drug Research was released this week.

"Marijuana is a dangerous drug and its use can lead to severe consequences
for vulnerable young people," responded President Bill Clinton's drug czar,
retired general Barry McCaffrey.

- -- Staff

Copyright © 1998, The Globe and Mail Company