TWO COUNTRIES TOOK THE DRUGS TEST. WHO PASSED?

In Holland, There Is No War On Drugs. They Believe This Is A Social
Problem, Not A Criminal One. And All The Evidence Suggests That Their
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. The walls are tiled, the floor is bright linoleum. 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. Last week in Britain, some commentators were endorsing calls from
the newly ennobled former New York mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, to jail
cannabis smokers , and vilifying Brian Paddick, police commander of
Lambeth, for telling an internet forum that the drug laws need reform. 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
to smoke at the tables or take away. In Holland, ideas considered
dangerously radical in Britain 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. If you look at England,
France, Spain, they all have drug problems. But Holland started thinking
about how to deal with this much earlier. We're not deluded we can solve
the problem entirely, but we can contain it, make it controllable. You are
20 years behind.'

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 pur chases from dealers,
which still remain illegal. But measured against the near-catastrophe of
drugs policy in Britain, the evidence suggests the Dutch are right.

Last summer I spent weeks researching two Observer articles about hard
drugs in Britain. As I rapidly discovered, the past decade has seen an
explosion in Class A drug use, mainly crack and heroin. Seizures by Customs
and police have soared, but the price has fallen steadily, while the market
has expanded far beyond its former inner-city strongholds. In Cotswold
villages of golden stone and tea shoppes, heroin can be summoned more
easily than a takeaway meal. As the drug research charity Drugscope
confirmed last week, teenagers are progressing from cannabis to crack and
heroin much more quickly.

With increasing drug dependency, drug-related crime has surged. Good
intentions and good ideas to deal with this crisis have not been lacking.
Since the mid-1990s, Governments have recognised the need to cut demand
through education, and invested heavily in drug rehabilitation. Yet, with
the sole exception of the present Home Secretary David Blunkett's move to
reclassify cannabis as a Category C drug, the basic legal framework has
remained untouched. Commander Paddick can ask his officers not to arrest
for smoking a spliff, but sanctioning coffee shops is not within his remit.
More radical reform remains a political taboo.

In Holland, drug policy begins with pragmatism. Its central objective, says
Harold Wychgel, of Drugscope's Dutch equivalent, 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'. The
Dutch accept that achieving this may require apparent contradictions and
compromises.

Selling cannabis through 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 from the Middle East and potent hydroponic 'Nederweed' 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 Britain are
investigated, prosecuted and sent to prison. Is this a problem? Vewer
shrugs genially. Apparently not.

The Rhine canal shop manager smiles. 'I've been doing this for 25 years.'
He pauses. 'Buying is just... well, allowed.'

In border areas, and in honeypots such as Amsterdam, coffee shops have
boosted Holland's income from tourists. However, the reason they began to
appear in 1976 was as a means of separating the markets for soft and hard
drugs, and thus for closing the dealers' 'gateway' from cannabis to heroin
and cocaine.

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.'

At an average £20 a gram, Dutch heroin is about half the price it is in
England, where the fact that the drug is cheaper than it was in 1990 has
helped dealers persuade their customers to transfer from cannabis. Per head
of population, Holland has perhaps a quarter of Britain's addicts.
Meanwhile, Holland also has significantly fewer cannabis smokers,
especially among teenagers. 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. Less
than one in 1,000 had tried heroin. 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.

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.
Some deal with the homeless addict's survival needs. At the Inlope centre,
beneath another part of the shopping mall, registered users can get a
shower, clean clothes, cheap hot food, a game of pool and a respite from
the rigours of the street.

The new Stek building, a smart bungalow next to a canal, combines
drug-taking rooms with a cafe and common room. From an addict's point of
view, the benefits are obvious. 'Before they built this place,' says
Martin, 34, a crack and heroin user for 16 years, 'they hunted us. You had
to use on the street and look behind you. Now you can really enjoy your
stuff, and you're not so stressed. Life is much less aggressive.'

At the same time, Vewer argues, wider society is also better off. The
addicts' centres provide immediate access to rehabilitation programmes and
employment training for those who want them, and some work at the centres
themselves, cleaning, cooking or washing clothes and bedding. Ruud Laukon,
a field coordinator from Utrecht's main drug social work project, the
Centrum Mallieban, works seamlessly with Vewer: 'We and the police have the
same viewpoint. If you treat addicts as criminals, they'll treat you as
criminals do. Sending them to prison doesn't solve anything.'

The addicts used to spend their days in a dark, fetid pedestrian tunnel
beneath the Hoog Catherijne mall, which has now been closed. Intimidating
and dangerous for passers-by, it also saw frequent violence between
addicts. 'It's much easier now to have good relationships with them,' 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.'

Patrolling the mall with two uniformed policemen, Robert Wisman and Sander
van der Kamp, the personal nature of that control is strikingly apparent.
Time and again, users greet the officers and stop to talk. As we pass
through the maze of shops and restaurants, they point out the known
dealers, some of whom they have sent to prison. In Utrecht, as in Britain,
addicts steal to fund their habits. As we walk, Wisman 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.' How about robbery, muggings? Wisman stops and the
two officers confer. 'I think there may have been one last year. I'm not
sure. It's very rare.' Car-jackings? They laugh. 'Not here.'

Official figures bear them out. The Hoog Catherijne may be the centre of
Utrecht's drug scene, but crime is no more common there than anywhere else.
In 2000, the International Crime Victims Survey confirmed the impression
from the streets: the crimes typically committed by drug addicts -
burglary, robbery, shoplifting and theft from cars - are all significantly
more prevalent in Britain than in Holland.

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.'

His reply speaks volumes about the difference between the British and Dutch
approaches to drugs and crime. In Britain, successive politicians and
police chiefs have vowed to defeat drugs, and in presenting their
rhetorichave pumped up the enemy in the eyes of the public, exaggerating
its strength and demonising addicts, using the media to create waves of
what criminologists call 'crime panics'. The result has been an almost
complete restriction on political room to manoeuvre.

In Holland, a calmer conception of the relationship between the state and
citizen, and awareness of the state's limitations, have created a strategy
of containment and limiting harm, and where necessary, an expedient,
pragmatic fudge. There's little doubt which has been more effective.