Drugs: The Dutch Can Handle Their Pot

Since the 1970s, the Dutch have been famous among backpacking tourists, public health officials and drug-use researchers for their unusual national stance toward marijuana. Technically, the drug is illegal in the Netherlands. But the country has an official policy of non-enforcement, and you can buy the stuff — no more than 5 grams at a time — in hundreds of cannabis coffee shops.

This approach — somewhere in between all-out prohibition and free-market legalization — is like no other policy in Western Europe, or in the United States for that matter. But research reveals a surprising fact about Dutch tokers: The country's drug policy may be remarkable, but very little about its users is.

If you looked at all the data points in this paper, you wouldn't be able to tell which ones were the Dutch, said Robert MacCoun, a professor of public policy and law at the University of California, Berkeley, who has reported new findings in the journal Addiction. The Dutch data are right in the middle of the distribution. There's just nothing particularly distinctive about drug use in the Netherlands, which is interesting simply because many people assume that Dutch drug use must be out of control. And it's not.

Not only is it not out of control, but people who smoke pot in the Netherlands are less likely to escalate their use — into a heavier habit or harder drugs — than they are in the U.S., and they tend to mature out of marijuana faster than American users do.

Since 1997, officials have been stricter in shutting down shops that violate basic requirements. They can't allow in children under 18, they can't sell any other drugs, and they can't advertise marijuana.

For more, see The Dutch Can Handle Their Pot by Emily Badger, September 16, 2011 at Miller-McCune.