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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (8646)	1/10/2006 11:56:50 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541326

Netherlands - hard drugs are illegal but not widely used. I can't say why, maybe it's a cultural thing. The only crack dealers I ever saw were Africans down in the red light district. I never saw drug activity on street corners in other neighborhoods. In practice, they tolerate soft drug users. They make growing and selling the stuff difficult, which is kind of stupid but what do you expect from politicians. In general they go after the hard drug dealers and offer treatment for all hard drug users, moreso than throwing users in jail like we do. The Americans in Dutch jails for drugs are mostly smugglers who were caught bringing hard stuff in. Several US states have state-run liquor stores. I imagine that state-run drugstores would be the same with equal liability (almost none if they don't sell to minors). I have no idea which drugs would end up on the legal side of the fence apart from grass, hash and maybe shrooms. Coke and meth would be tough ones to figure out - they are a huge part of the drug trade so you want to undercut the criminal element in them, but they are also very damaging to people. I doubt they would end up in a final version of any plan. But all of this is a pipe dream anyway (pun intended). Ain't gonna happen in the US for decades if ever.