B.P. Terpstra
My surname is a giveaway. But in case you don’t know, I’m from a Dutch background and have a genuine interest in what Larry Collins described as “Holland’s Half-Baked Dutch Experiment” (Foreign Affairs May/June 1999).
My surname is a giveaway. But in case you don’t know, I’m from a Dutch background and have a genuine interest in what Larry Collins described as “Holland’s Half-Baked Dutch Experiment” (Foreign Affairs May/June 1999).
For sure, the worst kept secret has been out for decades. “Our liberal drug policy has been a failure, but its advocates are so rooted in their convictions they can’t bring themselves to admit it,” explained Dr. Franz Koopman, director of De Hoop drug rehabilitation center in Dordecht. “First, we banalized cannabis use. We have left our kids with the idea that it’s perfectly all right to smoke it, and from there it was an easy step for them to move to the notion that it’s also okay to use mind-altering substances like ecstasy.”
Today, Holland is still a drug capital.
It’s no coincidence either that European socialists are open to embracing mind-destroying drugs, as opposed to, say, open debates on “manmade” global warming.
The unromantic truth: I’ve witnessed the drug revolution, and it’s an Orwellian lie. If you want more government in your lives, then go soft on drugs. Decriminalizing rape will never reduce rape crimes, so what motivates elites to mother society’s brain-raping sellers?
I also have an intellectual ally in Dr. Theodore Dalrymple. The British author of Our Culture, What’s Left of It reasons (p. 232), “If the war against drugs is lost, then so are the wars against theft, fraud, rape, murder, arson, and illegal parking. Few, if any, such wars are winnable. So let us all do anything we choose.”
Did you know that it costs millions to lock up domestic violence monsters too? Releasing serial granny rapists will save us still more!
As well, other cost-saving promises made by drug-first libertarians and their enablers fail commonsense tests. “Even the legalizers’ argument that permitting the purchase and use of drugs as freely as Milton Friedman suggests will necessarily result in less governmental and other official interference in our lives doesn’t stand up. To the contrary, if the use of narcotics and stimulants were to become virtually universal, as is by no means impossible, the number of situations in which compulsory checks upon people would have to be carried out, for reasons of public safety, would increase enormously.”
Finally, a suggestion: Let’s consult struggling free-market businesses attacked by free drug addicts if liberty is our stated goal.