Soft Dutch drug policy a far cry from past

By Thor Kerr

THE HAGUE (JP): Space cake, magic mushrooms and exotic hashish are on the menu at more than 1,000 "coffee shops" in the Netherlands.

At the Extase Coffee Shop in Amsterdam, a waiter yells over a Bob Marley track: "Everything you see on the menu is legal."

This is not entirely true. Possessing soft drugs is an offense under the country's Opium Act, but the waiter, his boss and the dozen local and English customers rolling joints in the Extase Coffee Shop will not be prosecuted because of a national policy to ignore the soft-drug trade.

The Ministry of Justice says this policy, which allows the coffee shops to sell up to five grams of soft drugs to anyone over 18, will "protect the health of individual users, the people around them and society as a whole".

The policy aims to decriminalize the soft-drug trade and keep people away from harder drugs by stopping them buying from the criminal underworld. This policy is somewhat confusing given that the production of soft drugs is illegal.

A justice ministry employee said earlier this month that coffee shops bought their cannabis and marijuana "on the black market" since there were no legal sources.

The black market hangs like a dark cloud over the Dutch drug policy. Men loiter around the canals near the Extase Coffee Shop ready to offer people Ecstasy, heroin and other hard drugs.

But the Ministry of Justice claims that its drugs policy is working. It claims the number of drug addicts in the Netherlands has remained stable at 25,000 for many years and the country has the lowest incidence of drug-related deaths in Europe.

The only way to handle the drug problem is to keep it in the open and help drug addicts rehabilitate themselves, says the ministry.

But the Dutch have not always been so concerned about drug addiction and the harm it causes a society.

The Netherlands built a substantial part of its wealth on the back of opium sales to the people of Java, Madura, Bali and other islands of Indonesia from the 17th century, according to Dutch government archives.

In the mid 19th century, about 15 percent of the Netherlands Indies colonial revenue came from opium sales through government- awarded licenses for regency-based opium monopolies. Three-year licenses for these monopolies were sold to the highest bidder in each regency, usually ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs.

Under the monopolies, opium usage became widespread in villages and towns across the archipelago.

Historian James Rush writes in his book, Opium Farms in Nineteenth Century Java, that both the Chinese and Javanese in Java enjoyed opium. Rush says that, although the ethnic Chinese consumed more opium per person, the larger quantity of Java's opium was consumed by Javanese.

References to opium even featured in 19th century Javanese literature by poet Suluk Gatolotjo (translated by Benedict O'Gorman Anderson), who wrote favorably about opium consumption.

Not everybody liked the Dutch-administered opium trade, and in some parts of West Java it was banned. By the start of this century, Moslem leaders, Chinese chambers of commerce and the Boedi Utomo Javanese cultural movement were campaigning to reduce opium consumption in Indonesia.

The Dutch government responded to these demands by dismantling the monopoly system and taking over direct control of the opium trade. By 1913, there were no more regency-based opium monopolies.

The government replaced the monopolies with its own opium processing and distribution network, using a factory it had set up in Jakarta. The factory, established in 1894, processed opium imported from India and packed it in small tin tubes, carrying a government label, which were sold in government shops around the archipelago.

There were 1,480 of these opium shops in 1914, according to a 1923 Dutch government policy statement on opium in the Netherlands Indies.

It was illegal to smoke opium in the shops, but customers could take their tubes of opium to one of 160 licensed dens to smoke at leisure.

International pressure grew to end the lucrative opium trade because of its adverse health and economic effects. This forced the Dutch government to rethink its opium policy.

Despite government attempts to reduce consumption by licensing opium-shop customers and raising the opium price, opium sales in the Netherlands Indies did not fall. The annual quantity of opium sold remained much the same in the early 1920s as it was in 1914.

The government argued in 1923 that it could not cut back opium sales further without people turning to the black market for supplies.

In the end it was economics rather than Dutch morality that saved Indonesians from opium addiction. The devastating rural depression in the 1930s slashed opium consumption across the archipelago.

Rush says this depression, combined with tighter opium licensing and a change in local attitudes away from the drug, made opium smoking nothing more than an "old man's vice" by the time Japanese forces arrived in Indonesia in 1942.

Today, opium and all illicit drugs are banned in Indonesia, but the drug connection continues with its former colonizer. Many of the drug-trafficking operations foiled by Indonesian customs officials, particularly involving Ecstasy, are believed to have been based in Holland.