B.P. Terpstra
Now, a Dutch commission has found that hashish and marijuana on sale in the Netherlands contain around 18 percent of THC, the main psychoactive substance, and advised the health minister that anything above 15 percent put drugs on a par with heroin or cocaine.
“I've been very worried for years about the THC concentration, especially if it is so high. We will take a serious look at it," Health Minister Edith Schippers told public broadcaster NOS.
“The addictive consequences are much stronger and severe. Clearly this is a worrying development.”
When asked if tolerant soft drugs policies would end if some cannabis was labeled as a hard drug, she said: “The THC concentration fluctuates widely so the 15 percent level is not common. You'd have to look at how to change this development.”
Utopianism disappoints. Decades earlier, the Dutch experiment was sold uncritically as progressive, and the way of the future. In recent years, however, so-called soft drugs have been restricted on health and crime grounds, because attacks on family businesses and medical costs are costly, as conservatives predicted.
Some background. Here’s Larry Collins in Foreign Affairs (May/June 1999):
As the coffee shops boomed between 1984 and 1996, marijuana use among Dutch youths aged 18 to 25 leapt by well over 200 percent. In 1997, there was a 25 percent increase in the number of registered cannabis addicts receiving treatment for their habit, as compared to a mere 3 percent rise in cases of alcohol abuse. In 1995, public Ministry of Justice studies estimated that 700,000 to 750,000 of Holland’s 15 million people – about 5 percent of the population – were regular cannabis users. A much more recent study just completed by Professor Pieter Cohen of the University of Amsterdam disputes those figures, claiming that only [!!!] 325,000 to 350,000 Dutch men and women are regular cannabis users. Unfortunately, however, his survey discovered that those smokers are particularly concentrated among the young in densely populated areas of Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Rotterdam. In the last three to four years, these same areas have witnessed a skyrocketing growth in juvenile crime and number of youths involved in acts of violence associated by many Dutch law-enforcement officers with the abuse of “soft” drugs.
Now, in 2011, even left-libertarians are rethinking utopianism.