Dutch Talking About Legalizing Exstacy to Control It and Reduce Crime

[dutchdemocrat]

Call for legal ecstasy

Can anyone even imagine government leaders in America discussing things like this?

http://www.rnw.nl/hotspots/html/ned030908.html

SNIP

"That is the question. It would be wonderful if we had a laboratory situation where we actually can see whether that is the case. The only way we can compare the drugs market is, for instance, with cannabis. The use of cannabis in the Netherlands in youth – let's say drug starters – is far less than for instance, in the US. And the US has a very repressive policy, and there, it is said, about 41 percent of youth is using it regularly, and in the Netherlands it's far less. We don't believe that having a very restrictive policy helps people not to use."

SNIP


"What we have been seeing is that the judicial system in the Netherlands is largely overstrained due to drug-related crime. It is believed that about 50 percent of all the activities of the judges and the police have a relation to drug-related crime, and due to that it means that other heavy crimes like theft and even murder and other serious crimes are getting less and less attention. That made us very worried."

"We came to the idea of maybe finding a more pragmatic way to deal with drugs, because the main question is that there is a large demand for legal drugs. Ecstasy is – next to cannabis – the illegal drug used for recreational purposes in the Netherlands, mainly by youth in party time. We don't know enough about the addiction effects, but so far in the Netherlands, our main clinics like the Jellinek and other institutions which help drug addicts, are not convinced that ecstasy is heavily addictive."

"Well cocaine might be another question. With ecstasy, it's a very clear group. It's mainly youth who are using it, it's what they call a party drug. Cocaine might be another question, though even cocaine is used a lot in recreational spheres. In arty circles, ballet-dancers, journalists, public relations officers. Coke is used in all kinds of layers of our society, and mainly when you talk about hard drugs, we think about the people on the margins of society, the junkies, who we meet everyday in our train stations, and even for them we are not convinced that penalising it, keeping it in the penal code, is very helpful."