| Drugs and the Dutch |
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| Written by Tim Worstall | |
| Monday, 15 October 2007 | |
Around here we pretty consistently argue for the legalization of all
drugs. Partly for moral reasons (it's your body, use and abuse it as
you wish) and partly for more practical reasons. Legal substances would
be, for example, subject to greater quality control and thus more
regular dosages. Which is what makes this news from the normally so
pragmatic Dutch so depressing :The Dutch government will ban the sale of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the justice ministry said yesterday, rolling back part of the country's permissive drug policy after a number of incidents, including the death of a teenager who had eaten them.....Psilocybin, the main active chemical in the mushrooms, has been illegal under international law since 1971. However, fresh, unprocessed mushrooms continued to be sold legally in the Netherlands on the basis that it was impossible to determine how much of the naturally occurring substance any mushroom contained. Mr Van der Weegen said that was also why the system proved unworkable. "The problem with mushrooms is that their effect is unpredictable. It's impossible to estimate what amount will have what effect."Making them illegal will not do anything to aid this problem, far from it, it will make the problem worse. As it does with heroin, with cocaine and all the others, a goodly part of the physical harm caused by such drugs is in the inaccuracies of the dose being taken. Further, to make illegal something that grows in the fields of the country (a particularly fine crop used to appear on the rugby pitch at school) is going to present certain problems with enforcement. We used to use a phrase for things that were particularly incomprehensible: Double Dutch. Making something illegal, which will increase uncertainties over dosage, in the name of protecting people from uncertain dosages, seems a useful time to revive the phrase.
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