It is common knowledge throughout the world that in Amsterdam you may enter a coffee shop and buy soft drugs. What is more – you will be handed a menu with drugs of the day, and there might be even a special on the menu. It is all accessible - for four joints you will pay the same price as for twenty cigarettes. Nobody will arrest you, because it is legal. So what kind of laws are these? Aren’t the Dutch concerned about the real dangers of drug abuse? Amsterdam drug laws evolved the same way as laws in other countries during the past century, but the solutions taken in the Netherlands, differ from the rest of the world. For up-to-date news on the status of Amsterdam drug laws and other related issues, check out our Amsterdam Coffee Shop News 2014.
Dutch drug laws
Dutch drug policy is directed by an idea that every human being may decide about the matters of its own health. The Dutch consider this rule as fundamental, accepting for example the possibility of the controlled suicide (euthanasia), for terminally ill patients. Although this is also possible in Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and some parts of the US. Another idea which guides Dutch laws in their drug policy is a conviction that hiding social negative phenomena does not make them to disappear - on the contrary makes them worse, because when concealed, they become far more difficult to influence and control.
Applying these ideas to their drug laws the Dutch try as much as possible to decriminalize the use of drugs, making it a private matter of each individual, and not a matter for the enforcement apparatus. Production, trading and stocking drugs remain a criminal offence, as in any other country.
The Dutch see the use of drugs as a health matter, similar to the use of tobacco and alcohol, and in fact not very distant from problems of obesity, alcoholism and tobacco smoking. They also point to the fact that prohibition of alcohol in the US in the years 1919-1933 brought more negative effects of increased criminality, than the positive social changes and had to be withdrawn.
The Dutch have divided drugs into two groups, depending on their influence on human health – soft drugs and hard drugs. Hard drugs as cocaine, LSD, morphine, heroin are forbidden in the Netherlands as in any other country.
Soft drugs as cannabis in all its forms (marijuana, hashish, hash oil) and hallucinogenic mushrooms (so called magic mushrooms or paddos – from Dutch: paddestoel - mushroom) are legal under condition of so called "personal use". As a result smoking of cannabis even in public, is not prosecuted as well as selling it although technically illegal under still valid Opium Act (dating from 1919, cannabis added as drug in 1950), is widely tolerated provided that it happens in a limited, controlled way (in a coffee shop, small portions, 5 grams maximum transaction, not many portions on stock, sale only to adults, no minors on the premises, no advertisement of drugs, the local municipality did not give the order to close thecoffee shop).