I am in Amsterdam again. Whenever I come here I realize how the rest of the world looks at this as the city of sin, but how the Dutch look at this as the safest way of dealing with all things man wants to do regardless of laws. So if we looks for these pleasures anyway why not approach it from a public health perspective? The Dutch laws may allow some drug use, it does not mean they promote drug use, just that if you use them it should be safe for you, for your environment, and that society should be protected from the ill effects of it.
Kuro5bin has a good article about this today.
Posted by Werner Vogels at November 9, 2003 03:10 AM"Dutch drug use is indeed not much different from that of most Western societies, including the United State. The Dutch just have less HIV infection, deaths from overdoses, and imprisonment - and less of almost every type of drug use".
I wonder how well Holland would compare with, say, Sweden or Denmark - countries of roughly the same size and equally "europeanized". I don't know the stats but my hunch is you'll find the same rates of drug-related crime, desease, addiction etc. Which would mean that USA does not compare well with any of the above - and the argument for adopting the Dutch model would fall apart.
Which is bad because I don't think the US has any clue about drugs. Maybe it's just a very different society - if you legalized drugs in Russia right now (and they're not hard to find either out there) it would create real havoc, people are just too unruly. Perhaps americans at large are equally "infantile" in that sense, and not only in terms of gov drug-policies.
