More interesting is the sudden connection between our drug policy and the (planned) closing of prisons. I first noticed that a couple of days ago on digg.
There is no such connection, and it hasn’t been mentioned in the local press. Although I must admit it’s an interesting line of thought…

A quick Google search for a few prisons seems to confirm it. I found a few numbers between 200 and 350.

Here’s some info on the legality of most drugs.
This is the “Opium wet” or Opium law in english. However I’m nowhere near lawyerly enough to try to translate this.

Have a nice day.

Technically, drugs are illegal in the Netherlands. Technically… The thing is that the Dutch have a long tradition of common sense in their legal system.

Sure, legal academics can call it injustice if they like, but it seems that unlike any other place in the world, the Dutch realize that sometimes social order is best preserved by not enforcing the law universally. The message is pretty clear, if you are a member of organized crime, then you get busted under the drug laws, if not, then you are left alone. Same with prostitution.

Only real problem is that legal advocates in this country and crazy moralists have been seeking to start getting these things enforced in practice, and with a police that seems to lack a significant function beyond filling state coffers with fines, they are getting support.

(Other times I realize they have a lot of weirdness too.)

Portugal however is a different case – where almost everything has been decriminalized (in small amounts anyway)… I’m keen to see how this policy changes the country in the future.

lots of stuff to read about it.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10080

Honestly, I’ve always felt that the worst part of Amsterdam was always the shitty stoner Americans…

I understand Cory’s hopeful connection

However, a link was shown between the implementation of Roe v Wade in 1973 and a reduction in crime about 20 years later in the US

Holland didn’t get their legalized abortion until ’81 and are now seeing a reduction in crime

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalized_abortion_and_crime_effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_United_States

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_the_Netherlands

You are too kind. Regarding Hirsi Ali, I *did* say jaundiced.

@35 Tiggy:

More or less true. Though a few coffeeshops are promoting a cold vapor system. I should check this out because a really good friend works at the Sensi Seed Bank and would know. The really high THC (>10%) “skunk” you really have to cut with shag tobacco. In the south, a bar owner who was also the only employee won a court case to allow smoking in his bar. I know of a few bars that flout the law after sundown, behind closed curtains. It remains to be seen whether the government will institute a crackdown. Anti-smoking cops are now ranked below parking cops in public esteem.

@37 MadSci:

I work down the street from a pretty big complex called the Bijlmerbajes, with six towers. It holds about 800 prisoners, mostly doing 6 months or less. I gather it’s one of the bigger ones.

It reminds me of Neal Stephenson’s description of American Megaversity (inspired by Boston U.).

In Haarlem is a somewhat older, dome-like prison on the Spaarne river. It has more of a Benthamesque Panopticon look to it. I don’t know how many prisoners it holds.

Still, the drop in crime has to involve something more systemic than not fretting over weed and whores.

I am prone to believing that at a certain point in life, a person has to stand up for themselves and say “I want X, Y, and Z from life, and in order to get that, I know I need to do A, B, and C.” This person will simply put aside their drug use in order to accomplish their goals, and when their life clears up this can be incredibly empowering.

It is one thing for teens to be doing drugs all the time. But for a person trying to make money, afford nice things, attract a mate, and build something meaningful from their lives: drug use is not always compatible. It is especially incompatible if it is not done in moderation.

I don’t know much about Dutch prisons, but assuming that you’re in America, I do know that the trend towards building bigger and bigger prisons that has come about in the USA has not been followed in much of the rest of the world.

Here in the UK, the government was recently forced to drop plans to build new 2500 capacity Titan prisons, and instead will be building to 1500 capacity. This is about the size of the largest prison we have in the UK at the moment – HMP Wandsworth – which has 1461 prisoners on average:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7129277.stm

I think the UK is more like America than it is like much of the rest of Europe too. I think Oslo prison is the largest prison in Norway, with a capacity of about 400, so I could easily believe that the average Dutch prison takes about 250 inmates.

If I remember correctly, there are fewer than 4000 inmates in the whole of Norway, compared to over 7 million in the USA. Make of that what you will.

Read all about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_the_Netherlands

Grtz,
Dutchski

It’s the increased use of alternative punishments. Rather then forced detention along with other, harder criminals, convicted people are instead forced out of their enviroments. Forced work, forced psychatric care, forced education even.

It’s the sort of thing that seems sane if one type of goverment does it but totally frightning if another does it (since it’s basically the same attitude 1984 has: those deemed criminal need to be fixed rather then punished).

First off, some disambiguation:

While a shade under a million pot-related arrests occur, only 35k state and 11k federal inmates are held. That costs in the neighborhood of $1 billion per year.

Meanwhile, estimates of the total value of pot sold in America, at its street value, come in at less than $50 billion per year. So, keeping people arrested is not a significant part of the economic side of this debate (compared to taxes).

California could expect to raise in the neighborhood of $1 billion in yearly taxes from legalization, though this comes from a questionable source (maybe half that?) Over the next 18 months, CA’s budget deficit is $41 billion. So, the idea that legalization would solve the deficit problem is incorrect as well.

It’s an interesting debate, though. The evangelicals taught us that the way to change public opinion is to get hold of a wedge issue and work at widening the gap between sides. Taxation may be that wedge.

A Nordic country like Sweden for instance, has an incarceration rate comparable to the Netherlands (but not to the USA of course, who’s #1 in the world at this).

Yet Sweden is very hard-line on drugs. Not as harsh as the USA in terms of sentence-lengths, but when it comes to marijuana and such, it’s less socially accepted than in the US. And fewer use it or have used it.

It’s very nontransparent and slippery slope and hypocrite at some points.

Still, the main rule is clear: we have to lists, and both lists contain illegal drugs. Cannabis is on the list with the soft drugs.

I guess we just marketed the hell out of this Amsterdam where everything is allowed image, mainly to tourists. Seems to work, too.

You know, the main difference between our drug policy and the one in the USA is that once Dutch youngsters have left puberty, they’re pretty much done with weed. Sure, we have the eternal stoners and the occasional tokers but since it’s not as exciting because it’s FORBIDDEN ZOMG ZOMG STICK IT TO TEH MAN, it just loses its appeal. Same goes for alcohol. Legal age for beer: 16. Legal age for liquor: 18.

Who says a state where there are loads of rules and high taxes can’t also be liberal as in libre-eral?

And, concerning the news item, well, this gives me hope and makes me dream.

Another world is indeed possible.

Verdonk thought that treating everybody the same instead of giving party members favours that no ordinary citizen could get would net her a reputation as a straight-shooter. For some reason that plan back-fired.

I guess there’s a lesson in there somewhere for British MPs these days.

Sort of. “Iron” Rita, as Minister of Immigration and Integration, was bound by law to void Hirsi Ali’s passport because the latter had lied about where she was from and why she entered the Netherlands. She came from Somalia and wanted to get out of an arranged marriage, but said she was from Kenya and fled a war. Actually, up to the 1990s, it was common for refugee agencies to help immigrants “sex up” their stories to more easily get citizenship or residency, and the government didn’t mind too much. Hirsi Ali became a parliamentarian in the center-left PvdA, the Party for Labor, but she switched to the VVD when the political winds shifted in 2002. Afterwards, she spoke out against femal gential mutilation and honor killings, but went beyond that to bait and scold Muslims in general. She supported the Iraq War.

Meanwhile, Rita, in her new cabinet post, was in the forefront in stiffening immigration laws. As a member of the VVD (Peoples Freedom and Democracy), a center-right party mostly out to privatizing government infrastructure and slash the social safety net as quickly as possible, Rita was right at home.

Rita tried to fast-track the deportation of refugees who had exhausted their appeals for staying in the Netherlands, all 26,000 of them. Also, on her watch, there was a bad fire in the illegal immigrants detention center at Schiphol Airport. The guards ran away, leaving a number of refugees to burn. Rita, undeterred, declared she would follow the law regarding Hirsi Ali’s case. Then she reversed herself and let Hirsi Ali keep her citizenship.

The government was shaky, with the Christian Democrats, whose leader, Jan-Peter Balkenende, was the Prime Minister, together with the VVD and a small, inoffensive center-left party called D66, just barely cleared the 76 seats needed for a mjority. Up to 2007, D66 went along with whatever their senior partners demanded in ending the good old tolerant days. But when it became obvious Rita put the fix in for Hirsi Ali, D66′s new chairwoman said screw this and withdrew, ending the second Balkenende government. The VVD threw Rita out of the party, and she started her own incredible shrinking party called Trots op Nederland (Proud of Netherlands).

Hirsi Ali liked to shoot off her mouth, and a number of voters liked that. But, via Parliament, that support didn’t extend to 24-hour protection at public expense. So she went to the US and immediately hooked up with the American Enterprise Institute. I gather her lecture fees there didn’t cover her protection expenses either and the AEI didn’t pony up, so as far as I know she’s doing the rightwing rubber chicken circuit. She’s a darling of Muslim-baiting. Danish cartoonists like her.

More on Rita & Ayaan here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Verdonk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali

This is my extremely jaundiced view of the last 7 years of Dutch politics.