Pubdate: Sat, 08 April 2000
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Copyright: 2000 Associated Newspapers Ltd
Contact:  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/
Author: Rebecca Fowler, In Amsterdam

MYTH OF THE DRUGS UTOPIA

Last week, a report urged the relaxation of Britain's drugs laws and cited 
Holland's easy-going regime as the way forward. We sent a writer to 
Amsterdam where she uncovered the sordid reality of this liberal dream...

The door of the Grasshopper coffee shop in Amsterdam creaks open, and the 
fresh-faced patrons stare up through the smoke. Some are smiling, orthers 
murmur earnestly, and one boy is clutching his head in his hands over a 
wooden table.

'He's had the White Widow,' confides a seasoned onlooker, referring to a 
particularly potent new brand of skunk weed. 'Takes a bit of getting used to.'

At first glance, the scene seems almost quaint. Here are young people 
sharing cannabis joints, sipping milky cups of tea, listening to reggae on 
the juke box and discussing world peace. The policemen at the station over 
the road do not bat an eyelid.

This is the liberal and beguiling face of Holland's 'blind eye' drugs 
policy. There are hundreds of similar coffee shops across the city, where 
drug-users can smoke without fear of prosecution in the simple belief that 
tolerance, not prohibition, is the answer.

It is also the system warmly praised in the recent report by Viscountess 
Runciman, which caned for a more liberal and radical approach to drugs in 
Britain. Her panel argues that these people will smoke a spliff anyway, so 
far better let them do it in safety.

LIBERALS in Amsterdam are well rehearsed in these arguments: If you make 
soft drugs legal, you protect users from the worst aspects of 'narcocrime', 
including dealers who might lead them to the far more evil 'hard' drugs, 
like cocaine and heroin.

But after more than 15 years of experimenting, is Holland really the way 
ahead? Or are the cracks in the liberal drugs dream beginning to show, with 
disastrous consequences?

The simple fact is that the Dutch are losing confidence in their own 
system, just as our policy-makers are considering taking it on.

Despite claims that heroin use has fallen, that drug deaths are low and 
that violence and drug-related crime have dropped, the use of cocaine and 
Ecstasy among young people has risen to the highest in Europe. Heroin use 
among teenagers is still the third highest.

Holland is also fighting its newfound image as the 'drug pusher of Europe'. 
The 'blind eye' approach has made it a haven for pushers and suppliers.

More than 80 % of the heroin smuggled into Britain is believed to have come 
through Holland, and 87 % of the Ecstasy that comes here is Dutch. There 
are more Dutch drugs here than cheeses. Under pressure from its European 
neighbours, the Dutch government is now asking: has it all gone horribly wrong?

Behind the veneer of liberalism is a much darker picture of confused law, 
disastrous loopholes and hypocrisy. Most disturbing of all is the way the 
soft and hard drug markets have merged again.

The supposed division between them, quoted in the Runciman report, is as 
illusory as the cheerful smiles of the prostitutes in the neon-lit windows 
of Amsterdam.

Darkness descends over Amsterdam and the coffee shops between the red light 
district and the university begin to fill up. Inside, the signs are clear 
for all to see: 'No hard drugs here.'

But outside, the dealers sidle up to you on the tiny streets and discreetly 
elbow you as you pass, hissing 'Ecstasy, cocaine, crack' under their 
breath, like a mantra. 'Can I get you something?' One whispers, with a 
faint, salesman smile.

'Like what?' you ask. 'Anything, he says. 'I can get you anything you like.'

BY 11 AM the following morning, a steady flow of tourists are making their 
way into the Rijksmuseum. The clean, white van parked outside with a 
security camera on the roof, goes unnoticed by most. But this is a very 
different side of drugs in the city.

This is the mobile methadone clinic for the most desperate addicts. They 
press the buzzer and shuffle in through the electric door at one end. Then 
they show their face to the nurses behind the glass screen, take a white 
paper cup, knock back their methadone ration and exit at the other end.

There is no interval. One after another they come, young and old, male and 
female.

Their faces are ravaged and gaunt, their eyes are heavy-lidded and 
lifeless. And despite the government statistics that suggest the average 
age of heroin users in the city is 41, many are clearly at least a decade 
younger than that.

David Dimon peers out from beneath a woolly hat. Aged 30, he has been a 
drug user for 16 years and dependent on hard drugs, cocaine and then 
heroin, for eight years. His story is typical.

When he was 14, around the time Holland was relaxing its drug laws and the 
first coffee shops were opening, he began smoking marijuana. He quickly 
became 'hooked' and by his late teens was smoking from 'morning till night'.

In the clubs in Amsterdam he was offered cocaine. While cannabis made him a 
'zombie', coke made him high. He was also able to function on it. His 
friends thought he had kicked his old habit, not taken on a new one.

 From cocaine he graduated to heroin, smoking both drugs in ever-increasing 
amounts, and spending 300 to 400 guilders a day on them. First he gave up 
his university studies in psychology, then he lost his job and, before he 
knew it, eight years of his life.

'It's laughable the policy here,' he says. 'At one end they make it very 
easy for you to take drugs and tell you it's fine. By the time you reach 
the other end, youre an outcast and they don't want to know you any more.

'Of course, being able to smoke drugs made it easy to move on to harder 
drugs. It's a first step. It's like walking, then driving and then getting 
a car of your own. It's a progression. I'm not saying that happens to 
everyone, but it happens to enough.'

AS WE jump onto a tram heading out towards the suburbs, he starts to become 
dreamy and vague. The methadone is working.

He does not regard it as a substitute for heroin, he explains, just another 
drug to top him up.

He and his friend Max, who has used drugs for 17 years, are on the way to a 
special place on the bland housing estate of low-rise flats where they can 
get free breakfast and where Max can smoke his crack pipe without anyone 
trying to stop him.

They point in the direction of the Jellinek clinic in Amsterdam, where 
7,500 patients are treated every year for addictions. After alcoholism, the 
biggest addiction is heroin.

David and Max dismiss the idea that drugs-related crime is low in 
Amsterdam. Even the endless racks of bicycles in the city are locked up 
these days. The battered ones may be worth only 25 guilders, but for the 
desperate junkie that is enough for a hit.

'There's such hypocrisy here over drugs,' says David. 'Now if you're a 
criminal you get help. You are given a special place to take your drugs. A 
policeman laughed at me the other day and said "You're a junkie who doesn't 
steal. You must be stupid".'

The argument that a tolerant drug policy would reduce demand for illegal 
drugs and drug-related crime becomes depressingly unconvincing, while 
talking to David.

He can buy heroin in the red light district for around 100 guilders a gram, 
he explains, less if you find the right dealer. But in the suburb of 
Bijlmermeer, the so-called ghetto of Amsterdam, it is even cheaper: 40 
guilders.

Here, among the soulless blocks of flats, dealers lurk in the shadows of 
the concrete car parks all day, waiting for business. They are not 
surprised to see strangers. Outsiders still risk the trip to buy drugs at 
bargain prices. 'Either you buy or you go,' grunts a man and gestures for 
us to leave.

NO PLACE better sums up the mixed messages on drugs in Holland than the 
Bureau De Loor. The discreet office in the centre of Amsterdam is manned by 
two drugs experts, who offer a 'safe-house' testing facility for the 
thousands of Ecstasy tablets being bought and sold in Amsterdam every day.

They do not ask the visitors who they are, whether they are dealers or 
individuals. They simply perform a test on a sample of a pill they have 
brought, tell them what it contains and how safe it is.

As a general rule if it is Ecstasy or MDMA then it will turn blue. If it is 
speed it will turn orange and if does not turn any colour at all, it is 
thrown in the bin. Too risky.

The bureau also offers a safe house service at raves around the city, for 
the thousands of young clubbers. Like the Runciman panel, they believe that 
young people will take Ecstasy anyway, so it is better to offer protection.

The bureau was set up by August De Loor, a drugs aficionado and youth 
worker who talks in grandiose language about the social importance of 
drugs. The police love him, he insists, because he helps create an 
atmosphere of safety; the doctors love him because he helps them protect 
the users; and of course the kids love him.

SURELY there was never a more confusing message than this about the risk of 
drugs for teenagers on the club scene. One Dutch public prosecutor, Hans 
Pieters, has described it as nonsensical. 'The police lab takes two weeks 
to test these drugs properly,' he said recently. 'The tests create an 
atmosphere of legality and reliability they cannot deliver.'

But Mr De Loor is infuriated by a new campaign in which the Dutch 
government is warning young people against using Ecstasy. Three weeks ago 
it launched adverts that insisted just one pill is enough to kill you and 
that users should not be fooled into thinking they were safe taking these 
tablets.

Ecstasy, perhaps more than any other drug, has embarrassed the Dutch 
government into action. The Netherlands is Europe's biggest producer of 
Ecstasy, and Amsterdam's tolerance policy has turned it into a virtual free 
port for the drug.

The southern Dutch province of Noor-Brabant, once renowned for its bootleg, 
gin and its amphetamines in the Sixties, is now home to Ecstasy factories. 
Pig farmers and mushroom growers, in financial difficulties, have been 
renting out sheds to producers.

The government set up special undercover teams to chase out the Ecstasy 
gangs. But, according to Mr De Loor, the government crackdown has made it 
harder for the suppliers to produce good Ecstasy. As a result, the users 
are either taking more pills, four instead of one, or moving on to 
low-grade speed.

'Because of the image of Holland as the Colombia of Ecstasy, the government 
has started this so-called war,' says Mr De Loor. 'But all it has done is 
reduce the quality of the Ecstasy because it's harder to produce it now. 
The consumers still want it, so they will still look for it. But they end 
up taking junkie speed instead.'

It is a stark illustration of how, if you create a blind eye policy and 
make a drug almost legal without the state controlling the supply, you are 
set for disaster. But why should Ecstasy be quasi-legal anyway? It is a 
potentially lethal drug of which the long-term dangers are still not known.

In the measured words of Scotland Yard's new commissioner, Sir John 
Stevens, who does not share the Runciman report's enthusiasm for the Dutch 
model: 'You've got to be careful about legalising things, just because you 
don't think what you're doing is successful.'

ON THE way back to the Grasshopper coffee shop, the liberal world of White 
Widow skunk and idealistic young smokers no longer seems quite so quaint or 
innocent.

An announcement on the radio that the government wants to control the type 
of cannabis being smoked in coffee shops and restrict it to plants grown in 
the Netherlands is a sign of the times. This is a bid to stop the flood of 
illegal drugs and get back some state control.

It is clear, talking to policy makers here, who only want to chat openly 
off the record, that the dream is over. No one has the heart for it any 
more. One senior figure smiled ironically at the notion that their British 
counterparts were keen to get liberal just as the Dutch were starting to 
face up to the fall-out in Holland.

'For every problem that the blind eye approach has solved, it has created 
another problem,' he said. 'With tolerance was supposed to come control. 
But those controlling the drugs world for their own ends are not liberals, 
they are opportunists who will exploit any loophole they can.

'You cannot have these policies in isolation, because it just makes you a 
magnet for the unscrupulous. And by making the drug legal, or at least 
tolerated, you have to control the supply as well. We created a legal 
demand for an illegal substance. The result is disaster.'

Here in Holland, you do not have to look far beyond the smiling images of 
young people smoking joints and dropping Es at raves to see the ravages. 
The government is now opening user rooms' across the city to keep the most 
hardened addicts off the streets. There can be no greater admission of failure.

They sit in hopeless groups, folding their foil and cutting out their drugs 
in a macabre parody of the coffee shops. Sometimes the police pop In for a 
chat. At 6 pm the room closes and they disappear again into a hinterland of 
hard drug abuse and despair.

BACK at the Grasshopper coffee shop, a group of 21year-old British students 
are smoking skunk. Their eyes are glazed and heavy-lidded. One looks a 
little pale and another is grinning.

Yes it was fun they insisted, and rather strange smoking in broad daylight 
in full view of a police station. But even after a few days in Amsterdam, 
they too were asking how high a price there was to pay for liberalism and 
drugs.

'You wander along the streets and see all the crackheads,' says one 
business studies student. 'They look terrible, really desperate, and you 
wonder how they got there. It's rather frightening.

'I wouldn't want to see that in London. It made me feel very uncomfortable. 
I wouldn't want that for the city where I live. It's not worth it.'
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