I've found this study by David F. Duncan, Dr.P.H., CAS, and Thomas Nicholson, Ph.D. It's about the Dutch Opium Act and how the US can learn from it. In The Netherlands we don't have a war on drugs, some drugs are tolerated. It's a nice, scientific and theoretical study and i would like to add my own 27 years of experience with the Dutch policy. It's not all that....
The Dutch Opium Act allows marijuana to be sold by "coffeeshops", among others. It's also legal for people over 18 to possess small anmounts of marijuana, for own use. But, itīs illegal to grow marijuana (exept a few plants for your own use). And that's a big problem. Because of the high demand for Dutch marijuana (Nederwiet) there need to be a lot of plantations. Illegal plantations.
You know where they are? Producers use normal apartments to build an plantation. And they don't stick to the rules and regulations of legal farmers. They often draw electicity illegally and don't do proper wiring. That causes fires in appartment buildings and sometimes results in injures or even death. Same with the plumbing. I know of at least one plantation in my street. And my estimation is that there are hundreds in my city.
While the production of drugs is illegal, itīs totally normal to supply the hardware.
An other big problem was that drugs, and especially marijuana, became "normal". And so more and younger people started using it. Where i went to highschool it was not uncommen for students to smoke some pot during a brake. It was a real HIGHshool experience for them :). There where coffe shops everywhere. Amsterdam alone had more than 300 on 700,000 inhabitants. So a few years ago a new rule said that a coffee shop could no longer be in the proximity of schools.
One of the pillars of the Dutch Opium Act are the two legal classes of drugs. Basically class one drugs are thought to be harmful and class two not. The idea is to concentrate police and law enforcement efforts on class one. But the Dutch government terrible failed at that. The Netherlands are one of the worlds largest producers of class one synthetic drugs. More than 70% of the XTC sold in the USA was produced in Holland. We are also an important gateway for cocaine, heroin, and hashish entering and leaving Europe. Like these recent cases.
What i think we should do. I think we should target all class one drugs very hard. Bring down production and export! You can call it a war on class one drugs if you want.
We should also discourage use of ALL drugs, class one and two. Educate people about the long term risks of the so called safe class two drugs. In Holland a lot of people are under the false imression that smoking a joint is much safer and better for yout health than drinking a glass of Heineken!
