DUTCH COURAGE TAKES THE DEMON OUT OF DRUGS

In the Netherlands, unlike New Zealand, they don't say "no" to drugs. They
say "know". And all the evidence, says David Rose, suggests that the policy
works.

On the busy road which skirts Hoog Catherijne, a vast indoor shopping
mall,the Stationsplein centre in downtown Utrecht looks like some kind of
clinic. There's a neat reception area and, four days a week, a nurse.
Stationsplein's main business happens in a row of glass-fronted rooms,
equipped with benches and sinks. In one of them crack addicts suck vapours
from makeshift pipes; in another, heroin smokers chase the dragon. A final
space is reserved for injectors. It goes without saying that their
state-provided needles are clean. In the last month former New York mayor,
Rudolph Giuliani, has been winning support for his call to jail cannabis
smokers, while in New Zealand the health select committee is pondering
decriminalisation; the latest in a decades-long list of political humming
and hawing. To arrive in Holland's fourth largest city is to cross a
cultural chasm. First there is the obvious: like most Dutch towns, Utrecht,
population 300,000, has its coffee shops, 40 of them, each selling dozens
of brands of cannabis. In the Netherlands, ideas considered dangerously
radical elsewhere attract little controversy. "There is no war on drugs in
the Netherlands," says Machel Vewer, a senior police detective who has
spent the past decade working with addicts. "What's the point of making war
on part of your own country? Drugs are here and they're always going to be.
This is a social problem, not a criminal one, and the whole of society has
to tackle it - not leave it to the police on their own. "This means
accepting that addicts are people too: that they have their backgrounds,
their stories, and you have to respect them. "They can still lead useful
lives, and they're not a lost group. We're not deluded we can solve the
problem entirely, but we can contain it, make it controllable." This is no
utopia. Around the stairwells and walkways of Hoog Catherijne, Utrecht's
addicts, many of them homeless, are highly visible: hunched, gaunt,
unshaven. The mall and its customers, brimming with prosperity, present an
inevitable target for thefts to fund purchases from dealers, which still
remain illegal. But measured against the near-catastrophe of drugs policy
in Britain, for example, the evidence suggests the Dutch are right.

The past decade has seen an explosion in British hard drug use, mainly
crack and heroin. New Zealand is a long way behind such trends, with hard
drug use not nearly the same problem. Still, New Zealand police report
strong anecdotal evidence of a drift in the nature and style of drugs being
used socially from cannabis to harder drugs such as methamphetamine. Our
drug legislation, at least the legal status of cannabis, is under review by
the health select committee. It heard submissions throughout last year and
is now deciding what recommendations it will make to the Government.
Despite the review, and the influence of the Greens, Health Minister
Annette King has refused to promote reform legislation. In an election
year, it's not a debate any of the mainstream parties are likely to want to
have.

In the Netherlands, drug policy begins with pragmatism. Its central
objective, says Harold Wychgel, of Dutch drug research charity the Utrecht
Trimbos Institute, "is to reduce the risks posed by the use of drugs to the
users themselves, people in their immediate vicinity, and society at
large". They accept that achieving this may require apparent contradictions
and compromises. Selling cannabis through the Netherlandss 1000 or so
coffee shops remains theoretically illegal. "They could close me down
tomorrow," says the manager of Utrecht's largest, a fume-filled den in a
fine Renaissance building by the banks of the Rhine canal. Yet his trade is
merely regulated, with the police checking that his bags of resin weigh no
more than 5g, and that none of his customers is under 18. The policy is
rigorously enforced, says Vewer. One shop was caught supplying to under-age
smokers, and its licence was withdrawn. In the coffee shops, the police are
regulating businesses dependent on organised crime. At their back doors,
owners buy their supplies from criminal importers and traffickers, who just
as in New Zealand, are investigated, prosecuted and sent to prison. Is this
a problem? Vewer shrugs genially. Apparently not. The policy may rely on a
legal fudge, but the evidence that it works is overwhelming. "Just look at
the figures," says Wychgel. "Heroin is just not an issue here in the
Netherlands. The number of addicts has been stable, at around 25,000, for20
years. And the addicts are getting older; few youngsters are joining them."

A report by Michale Webb - then a research student at the London School of
Economics and now a senior policy advisor for the New Zealand Police -
comparing the Dutch and New Zealand approaches in the Social Policy Journal
of New Zealand in July 2000 concludes "there is good evidence to suggest
that the soft and hard drug markets are effectively segregated in the
Netherlands, with a consequent reduction in drug-related harm".

From the age of 10, children are given drugs education. It tries, says
Wychgel, to present the facts about drugs in a way which removes any sense
of glamour, but leaves the decision up to the individual. "We say, 'It's
your responsibility, this is what drugs will do.' We don't tell kids simply
'no', we say 'know'." Trimbos surveys 10,000 Dutch schoolchildren every
four years. The last study, in 1999, showed a small decline in cannabis use
- - 20 per cent of those aged 15-16 had tried it, and 5 per cent smoked it
regularly. The same year the European Drug Monitoring Centre found 40 per
cent of British children the same age had tried cannabis, and one in 50 had
used heroin. In New Zealand, research by the Alcohol and Public Health
Research Council in 1998 showed that 39 per cent of 15 to 19-year olds had
tried cannabis, 30 per cent within the last year. Narrow the sample to just
18 to 19-year olds and the percentage in that age group who had tried
cannabis at least once reached 54 per cent.

A similar pragmatism, with reducing harm as the governing principle, is
visible in the way Utrecht deals with hard drugs. The smoking and shooting
rooms at Stationsplein form part of an impressive network of facilities.
Vewer says. "It creates a set of rules, and the addicts know they have to
abide by them. It makes the scene much easier to control." And much cheaper
for the state. The Trimbos Institute reports that in 1995, for example, a
mere 706 cases involving soft drugs were taken to trial, while a further
1305 were settled by the public prosecutor without the need for formal
court proceedings. That in a country of 16 million people. By comparison,
Webb says, in New Zealand during the same period, with a population of 3.6
million, 12,225 cannabis offences were resolved by prosecution resulting in
5389 sentences for cannabis possession or use. Nevertheless, Sally Jackman
of the New Zealand Drug Foundation warns not to put too much emphasis on
the impact of drug policy on drug use. "Let's not oversimplifye the drug
problem. Rates of drug use are not just the result of drug policy. They
arise out of a whole range of social conditions." Webb quotes several
researchers in the Netherlands concluding that on existing evidence, drug
policy has had only limited influence on drug consumption.

In Utrecht, as in New Zealand, addicts steal to pay for their habits.
Patrolling the mall with uniformed policeman, Robert Wisman, he explains
how the thin blue line tries to hold back crime. "We have a lot of bicycle
theft. The addicts steal bikes and sell them to students. And theft from
cars: they break the windows, take the stereo; and naturally some
shoplifting, and a few pickpockets." Before boarding my train for the
airport, I ask Wisman if he likes his job. "Very much," he says. "Sometimes
I get a little depressed that there's never going to be a real solution to
the drug scene. "But then again, I certainly don't think things are getting
worse."

- - Observer with additional reporting by Herald reporter