DUTCH SMOKESIGNALS

It´s difficult to look at peoples forefathers to judge about their ancestry. In Holland some of the natives question among them ´what happened with those good old times´. About half of the population is not born here or are children of mainly Moroccan or Turkish parentage. So the Dutch reformed church with all the other churches together don´t meet up with the number of visitors praying at the mosques. And all those pious people together are outnumbered by visitors of the so called ´coffeeshops´.

For the past 20 years, Dutch people over 18 have been able to buy and use marijuana in so-called coffeeshops.  In Amsterdam, capital of the Netherlands, are around 300 hash- and marijuana-selling coffeeshops, official licensed by the High Honorable Lord Mayor Mr. Schelto Patijn. The aristocrat Patijn, former dancepartner of Queen Beatrix I, is regularly showing up to inspect those ´coffeeshops´. In person he takes care that everything goes according the rules that everybody over 18 years of age can buy the in most other countries of the world illegal products of the cannabis-plant: hashish and marijuana. Despite the so-called War on Drugs in the United States are the Dutch with their liberal drug-policy the real winners. Not only in concern with the outrages numbers of junkies. After all those years of tolerating the use of cannabis the Dutch are less inclined to smoke marijuana than U.S. citizens. The survey by the Center for Drug Research at the University of Amsterdam found only two to three percent of Dutch over the age of 12 had used marijuana over a one-month period. In the United States, where the government spend millions on their War on Drugs and where it is very illegal to grow, purchase or use marijuana, a 1996 government study concluded around five percent of the population used cannabis at least once a month. Double of the figure of the Netherlands.

So all those shitheads who are against marijuana and hashish, en sentence people for what is widely available in Dutch ´coffeeshops´, let it be said loud and clear: the fock with all your prohibition-campaigns and drug-awareness-programs that only seem to stimulate. Not so strange that a lot of people are concerned about the current marijuana policy in the United States.

(Source: CNN, author: Reuters, publicized on April 16th, 1998).