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Fact #9
American Bureaucrats Slander the Real Lands of the Free to Keep Drug War Dollars Flowing
A major prong in the government’s drug
policy is to scare the crap out of its population. A tenet of this approach is
that any let down in the war on drugs will mean the nation’s children –
including little Suzie – will be inundated with drugs.
Now that America’s government has been coddling its population for close to a
century, people no longer realize that when drugs were legal in this country
there was no drug “problem.” Cocaine and heroin addicts accounted for the exact
same percentage of the population as they do now but they were treated by their
doctors and did not commit crimes, nor did they create massive dealer/law
enforcement bloodshed domestically and internationally.
This is arguably why the federal
government has so fiercely imposed its will regarding marijuana on the states
and other countries. When marijuana is legalized and Suzie does not become a
heroin junkie and pot smoke doesn’t fill the streets, their sham drug logic will
be revealed to people first-hand and no amount of silly marijuana ads will put
it back together again.
The one country that has had the
financial strength and political courage to tell America’s drug warriors to fig
off has been the Netherlands. In Holland, drug laws are still on the books (in
part to obey the international treaties pushed through by America), but
possession of small amounts of marijuana, heroin, and cocaine are disregarded.
The Dutch police are the strongest supporters of this system. It leaves their
prisons available for violent criminals and drug traffickers, and their drug
clinics available for people that actually want to use them.
For this policy that began in 1976,
Dutch officials have had to weather a “twenty-year barrage of invective” from
American suits. This barrage is filled with ridiculous lies that drug warriors
assume, usually correctly, their audiences will not catch. A slanderous lie of
former drug czar Barry McCaffrey’s was that the Dutch policy of giving heroin
free to addicts caused its murder rate to become twice America’s. (The Dutch
murder rate is half ours and heroin maintenance has been shown to reduce crime.)
Another drug czar, Lee Brown, was once bad mouthing the Dutch at a Los Angeles
town hall meeting. To Brown’s chagrin a Dutch ambassador happened to be present
and he politely refuted everything Brown had said.
The truth is that the Dutch approach has
been a smashing success and other European countries are moving towards adopting
their model. Despite crafty federal attempts to spin them negatively, e.g.
Needle Park, the facts speak for themselves. In Holland, between 1979 and 1994
the percentage of people under 22 years of age who use hard drugs dropped from
15% to 2.5%. Crack is practically unknown because powder cocaine is affordable,
supporting the theory that crack is a product of prohibition.
In the 1980s when cocaine hysteria was
racking America, Reagan launched a domestic and international war. At the same
time the Dutch explicitly mandated that their police not arrest people for
possession of hard drugs. The results? In 1987 only 1.7% of adults in Amsterdam
said they took cocaine in the last year while 6% of adults in New York City said
that they had used cocaine in the past six months. Drug usage across the board
is currently two to ten times lower in all relevant categories in the
Netherlands than in the United States.
Praise the Dutch – Not afraid to tell American politicians to fig off.
All information taken from You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos, Book I by Robert R. Arthur. Detailed documentation of sources can be found therein.
Page last modified August 29, 2007.