Around 3.3 percent of the Dutch population use cannabis, in line with the European average. This translates into 363,000 people, with an average age of 31. The starting age for cannabis use lies between 16 and 19. The volume of users has not changed over the past few years. A quarter use cannabis on a daily basis. Most users are men, some of whom are problem youths.
The amount of “happy chemical” tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, in home-grown Dutch cannabis is 16 percent while imported cannabis contains only 6 percent. The licensed coffee shops, which sell soft drugs, cover 70 percent of demand. Home dealers and cannabis couriers account for the remaining 30 percent.
The use of cannabis increases with greater availability. Cannabis users also drink more alcohol than their non-user peers and often take other drugs as well. Students who use the drug show more aggressive behaviour and perform less well in school.
Compared to nicotine, heroin and alcohol, THC is not thought to be very addictive but frequent use raises the risk of psychosis later in life. Cannabis use poses multiple problems to society. The number of people asking for help has been rising steadily since 1994.
The number of coffee shops nationwide has fallen to 729 from 1197. Half of all coffee shops are in the four main Dutch cities of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Den Haag. Four out of five local councils do not have coffee shops which have to adhere to strict regulation. Selling to minors, having too much cannabis on the premises and other infringements of the rules will lead to immediate closure.
Allowing the sale of small quantities of cannabis is linked in with the supply of the drug which is mainly in the hands of organised crime, the same group which also deals in illicit pills, cocaine and heroin. A recent study put paid to the argument that coffee shops separate hard drugs from soft drugs.
For these criminal groups, coffee shops provide a safe domestic market while at the same time attracting foreign buyers for all kinds of drugs. Next Friday, the cabinet will present parliament with a police report on organised crime in the Netherlands. Drug crime features largely in the report as a significant threat to society, with corruption, violence and money laundering as its accompanying ills.
The number of cannabis plantations in the Netherlands is thought to number 20,000. As much as three quarters of their yield could be meant for export. It is legally impossible to regulate the supply of cannabis to coffee shops, as some local councils are now proposing.
Former justice minister Piet Hein Donner (Christian Democrat) asked the legal research institute T.M.C. Asser Institute to investigate the idea as early as 2005 but European rules would not permit it. Growing cannabis for other than medical or scientific purposes remains punishable by law, both under United Nation treaties and European Union law.
That means that an experiment to control the growing of cannabis to supply coffee shops cannot be said to “comply to the spirit of existing treaties” as the T.M.C. Asser Institute put it. Therefore, a local council cannabis plantation such as the mayor of Eindhoven, Rob van Gijzel (Labour), proposed at last week’s ‘cannabis summit’ of Dutch mayors, is a nonsense. But something has to be done about the coffee shops and the crime that follows in their wake. That much is clear.
