No Fear or Loathing

National Review, August 29, 2005

I was somewhere around Oudezijds Voorburgwal, on the edge of Amsterdam’s Red Light District, when I knew that the drugs would never take hold. My vision was bad, but then it always is; my judgment was no worse than normal; and my usual bleak mood was no better. I had absolutely no interest in tie-dye, Hermann Hesse, granny glasses, world peace, the teachings of the Buddha, or a flower in my hair. I was a loser Leary, a deadbeat De Quincey.

It had all seemed so much simpler just a few hours before. I’d been sitting in an old café on Spuistraat discussing the state of Dutch politics (bad) over a few Dutch beers (good) with my friend Henk. Sixteen biertjes later (between us, between us), it was time to move on. Henk was saying something feeble about a heavily pregnant wife, had to be by her side, baby due any moment, and I, well, I felt the call of investigative journalism. Holland’s reefer madness had to be checked out. Thoroughly.

Cannabis is not exactly legal in the Netherlands. But it’s not exactly illegal either. Finding out exactly what the country’s policy of tolerance (gedoogbeleid) means is about as easy as following stoner logic, but its result is that in certain cities so-called “coffee shops” are allowed to sell small amounts of cannabis (a maximum of five grams at a time) to their customers. Coffee shops are licensed; they pay tax and are regulated: Alcohol is rarely on offer, hard drugs are strictly forbidden, and even soft drugs cannot be advertised. No minors are permitted on the premises, and you have to be 18 before you can graze on the grass (the drinking age in the Netherlands is 16). Finally, in a last, faint, despairing echo of the country’s Calvinist past, a coffee shop can be closed down if it’s a “nuisance.”

And in recent years, many have been. As always, when anything bad happens, France is involved. Concerned by the number of their nationals traveling to the Netherlands to stock up on pot, both France and Germany have been putting pressure on the Dutch to close down the coffee shops, or at least insist that only Dutch citizens be permitted to use them. For the most part, the Dutch have paid no attention, but the purchase limit was reduced to the current five grams (from 30) and other regulations were more strictly enforced. According to the possibly reliable Smokers Guide to Amsterdam (“an unbiased view of Amsterdam for casual party people”) the number of coffee shops in the city fell from 480 in 1990 to 279 in 2001. Once the less permissive center-right Christian Democrats came to power in 2002 this crackdown went further still. A little over 200 coffee shops survive there today.

But that was more than enough to choose from. Even after I had, um, weeded out the coffee shops with names that were either too redolent of the 1960s (The Doors, Flower, Kasbah, the Kashmir Lounge, Mellow Yellow, and Pink Floyd), too scary (Lucifera, Ruthless, Stud, and Xtreme), too derivative (Rick’s Café), too tactless (Midnight-Express), or unacceptably dependent on puns (High School, High Time, Highlander, and Highway), a wide selection still remained. Some were too seedy, others too hip; the place I eventually found was relaxed and welcoming even if some of the people there appeared really, really surprised to see me.

Perhaps my suit, tie, and shirt (Jermyn Street, since you ask) were to blame. Or was the problem my age, a Cruise-Holmes span away from that of the pretty young waitress? Maybe it was just that I quite clearly didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t brought any tobacco with me, or any rolling papers, or even a lighter. The menu was meaningless, but vaguely alarming. White Widow? Bubblegum? Domina Haze? Manali Crema? I felt confident that AK47 was not the way to go, but as for the rest . . .

“Have you ever smoked?” asked the young, young, young waitress, anxiously.

“I was at university during the 1970s,” I replied ambiguously, plagiarizing Newt Gingrich.

She laughed, and I bought five pre-rolled joints for twenty euros — dope for beginners, I suspected, a trip with training wheels. I smoked them quietly in a corner, reading The Economist (what did you expect, High Times?), while the other customers sat across the room, puffing on Bubblegum, occasionally glancing over at this misplaced Methuselah and his Economist and wondering, probably, whether the BTK killer had been caught after all. After an hour or so, nothing seemed to be happening. The joints smelled like 1967, but their effect was 1957. Had years of legal intoxicants taken their toll, or had I simply been had? Supplementing my sad-sap spliffs with more potent space cakes (“once you’re on the ride,” cautioned the Smokers Guide, “there’s no immediate way off!”) seemed unwise. It was time to go. So I did.

If space cakes were unwise, Amsterdam’s “smart shops” look really dumb. These stoner apothecaries, a more recent arrival, sell not cannabis, but a wide selection of nature’s naughtier productions: herbs, mushrooms, cacti, and odd, unidentifiable fungi of the type that usually means trouble in sci-fi movies too low-budget to spring for a proper alien. Some of their offerings may not work at all: To believe in a “natural Viagra best boiled in vodka” took, I felt, brains more thoroughly boiled in vodka even than mine. Others may work all too well: After some Salvia, “your balance is completely lost; gravity pulls you in amazing ways.” Oh, okay.

But Holland as a whole has not lost its balance. There’s no room to recite all the arguments here, but if the coffee-shop experiment has not worked quite as well as some of its boosters claim, its critics have fared even worse. Per capita cannabis consumption in the Netherlands is estimated to be at the EU average, and rather below that prevailing in these Altered States of America; and the Dutch, of course, have avoided much of the destruction, despair, and cost of the drug wars. Disappointingly for drug warriors, there’s no evidence either that easy access to cannabis has acted as a “gateway” to more dangerous pastimes: The incidence of heroin consumption is far less than in the U.S. Overall, Holland has one of the lowest rates of problem drug use in Western Europe.

If there is an objection to the coffee shops, it’s aesthetic. Owing to them, Amsterdam has become to cannabis what Bourbon Street is to Hurricanes. This fine old bourgeois city is in danger of turning into a euro-Kathmandu, a druggy destination overwhelmed by day trippers (literally), cannabis kitsch, and counterculture dreck — which could end up destroying the typically civil Dutch compromise that has made this experiment possible.

And then there are the town’s proliferating cannabis snobs, like wine bores only, somehow, even more irritating. You can read what they have to say (Nepal Temple Balls have, apparently, a “buzzy, chatty high that makes you zone”) on coffee-shop menus and in numerous guidebooks. Or go and hear for yourself. I joined the crowd downstairs at the “Cannabis College” on Oudezijdes Achterburgwal to gaze at some outlaw botany and listen to the mumbling, muttering, meandering Yoda who was its custodian. I could take the interminable, rambling discussion of the merits of one plant over another, but when he started referring to them as his “girls,” I knew that it was time for something else: A good, stiff drink.

Everybody Must Get Stoned?

Jacob Sullum: Saying Yes - In Defense of Drug Use

National Review, June 20, 2003

Jacob Sullum is a brave man. In his first book, the entertaining and provocative For Your Own Good, he attacked the excesses of anti-smoking activism and was duly—and unfairly—vilified as a Marlboro mercenary, a hard-hearted shill for Big Tobacco with little care for nicotine's wheezing victims. Fortunately, he was undeterred. In Saying Yes, Sullum, formerly of NATIONAL RF.VIEW and now a senior editor at Reason magazine, turns his attention to the most contentious of all the substance wars, the debate over illegal drugs. Sullum being Sullum, he manages to find a bad word for the mothers of MADD and a good one for 19th-century China's opium habit.

Sullum's effort in Saying Yes is more ambitious (or, depending on your viewpoint, outrageous) than that of most critiques of the war on drugs. Supporters of legalization typically base their case on moral or practical grounds, or both. The moral case is broadly libertarian—the individual has the right to decide for himself what drugs to take—while the practical objection to prohibition rests on the notion that it has not only failed, but is also counterproductive: It creates a lucrative (black) market where none would otherwise exist. Sullum repeats these arguments, but then goes further. Taken in moderation, he claims, drugs can be just fine—and he's not talking just about pot.

Whoa. In an era so conflicted about pleasure that wicked old New York City has just banned smoking (tobacco) in bars, this is not the sort of thing Americans are used to reading. Health is the new holiness and in this puritanical, decaf decade, most advocates of a change in the drug laws feel obliged to seem more than a little, well, unenthusiastic about the substances they want to make legal. Their own past drug use was, they intone, nothing more than youthful "experimentation." Most confine themselves to calling for the legalization of "softer" drugs and, even then, they are usually at pains to stress that, no, no, no, they themselves would never recommend drugs for anyone.

Sullum is made of sterner stuff. He admits to "modest but instructive" use of marijuana, psychedelics, cocaine, opioids, and tranquilizers with, apparently, no regrets. (Judging by the quality of his reasoning, I would guess the drugs had no adverse effect on him.) He seems prepared to legalize just about anything that can be smoked, snorted, swallowed, injected, or chewed—and, more heretically still, has no truck with the notion that drug use is automatically "abuse." "Reformers," he warns, "will not make much progress as long as they agree with defenders of the status quo that drug use is always wrong."

In this book Sullum demonstrates that if anything is "wrong"—or at least laughably inconsistent—it is the status quo. The beer-swilling, Starbucks-sipping Prozac Nation is not one that ought to have an objection in principle to the notion of mood-altering substances. Yet the U.S. persists with a war on drugs that is as pointless as it is destructive. This contradiction is supposedly justified by the assumption that certain drugs are simply too risky to be permitted. Unlike alcohol (full disclosure: Over the years I have enjoyed a drink or two with Mr. Sullum) the banned substances are said to be products that cannot be enjoyed in moderation. They will consume their consumers. Either they are so addictive that the user no longer has a free choice, or their side effects are too destructive to be compatible with "normal" life.

To Sullum, most such claims are nonsense, propaganda, and "voodoo pharmacology." Much of his book is dedicated to a highly effective debunking of the myths that surround this "science." There's little that will be new to specialists in this topic, but the more general reader will be startled to discover that, for example, heroin is far less addictive than is often thought. The horrors of cold turkey? Not much worse than a bad case of flu. (John Lennon—not for the only time in his career—was exaggerating.) Even crack gets a break: Of 1988's "crack-related" homicides in New York City, only one was committed by a perpetrator high on the drug. That's one too many, of course, but 85 percent of these murders were the result of black-market disputes, a black market that had been created by prohibition.

So if drug users are neither necessarily dangerous nor, in most cases, addicts, can they be successful CPAs or pillars of the PTA? Sullum argues that many currently illegal drugs can safely be taken in moderation—and over a long period of time. He interviews a number of drug users who have managed to combine their reputedly perilous pastime with 9-to-5 respectability. Sullum concedes that they may not necessarily be representative, but his larger point is correct: The insistence that drugs lead inevitably to a squalid destiny is difficult to reconcile with the millions of former or current drug users who have passed through neither prison nor the Betty Ford. As Sullum points out, "excess is the exception," a claim buttressed by the fact that there are millions of former drug users.

Typically, drug consumption peaks just when would be expected—high school, college, or shortly thereafter. Then most people grow out of it. The experience begins to pall and the demands of work and family mean that there's no time, or desire, to linger with the lotus-eaters. Others no longer want to run the risks of punishment or stigma associated with an illegal habit. Deterrence does-— sometimes—deter, and it may deter some of those who would not be able to combine a routine existence with recreational drug use. But this is not an argument that Sullum is prepared to accept: He counters that the potentially vulnerable population is small and may well become alcoholics anyway, "thereby exposing themselves to more serious health risks than if they had taken up, say, heroin." Sullum is not, we are again reminded, an author who is afraid of controversy.

But is he too blithe about the degree of potential medical problems associated with drug use? As he shows (occasionally amusingly and often devastatingly), much of the "evidence" against drug use has been bunk, little more than crude scare- mongering frequently infected with racial, sexual, or moralistic panic; but it doesn't follow that all the dangers arc imaginary. To be sure, he does acknowledge some other health hazards associated with drugs; but he can sometimes be disconcertingly relaxed about some of the real risks.

His discussion of LSD is a case in point. The causal relationship between LSD and schizophrenia is complex (and muddled by the fact that both schizophrenics and schizotypal individuals are more likely to be attracted lo drugs in the first place), but it's not too unfair to describe an acid trip as a chemically induced psychotic episode. The "heightened sense of reality" often recorded by LSD users is, in fact, exactly the opposite—a blurring of the real with the unreal that is also a hallmark of schizophrenia. Throw in acid's ability to generate the occasional-—and utterly unpredictable—"flashback" and, even if many of the horror stories arc no more than folklore, it's difficult to feel much enthusiasm for legalizing LSD except, just perhaps, under carefully controlled therapeutic conditions.

What's more, as a substance that, even in small doses, will create a prolonged delusional state, LSD is not exactly the poster pill for responsible drug use. But this exception should not distract us from the overall strength of Sullum's case. It is possible, he writes, to "control" drug consumption "without prohibition. Drug users themselves show that it is." It's unnecessary for him to add that the abolition of prohibition would imply a relearning of the virtue of self-control, a quality long imperiled by the soft tyranny of the nanny state.

For Sullum is not advocating a descent into Dionysian frenzy. The poverty of "Just Say No" may be obvious, he writes, "but moving beyond abstinence does not mean plunging into excess. Without abstaining from food, it is possible to condemn gluttony as sinful, self-destructive, or both . . . Viewing intoxication as a basic human impulse is the beginning of moral judgment, not the end. It brings us into the territory of temperance"—a word Sullum uses, accurately, to mean moderation. The 19th-century anti-alcohol campaigners who hijacked it were as cavalier with vocabulary as they were with science.

Proponents of legalization will, naturally, say yes to this book, but their opponents should read it too. Sullum's arguments deserve a response from those who disagree with him. As he points out, the costs of the war on drugs far exceed the billions of dollars of direct expenditure. They also include "violence, official corruption, disrespect for the law, diversion of law-enforcement resources, years wasted in prison by drug offenders who are not predatory criminals, thefts that would not occur if drugs were more affordable, erosion of privacy rights and other civil liberties, and deaths from tainted drugs, unexpectedly high doses, and unsanitary injection practices." Under these circumstances, it's up to the drug warriors to come up with a convincing explanation as to why we are fighting their drug war. Judging by this well-written, persuasive, and important book, they are unlikely to succeed.

A Hemp Museum

National Review, June 3, 1996 

Cannabis  Museum, May 1996  © Andrew Stuttaford

The streets of London, they used to say, were paved with gold. Maybe that is true of the City, the British capital's financial district, but take a walk five minutes to the east, to Shoreditch, and the surroundings are more mundane. Here you will find a theme park of pre-Thatcher Britain. The pub at the end of Redchurch Street is no exception. A drab spot despite its exotic dancer, the White Horse sports a cautious sign noting that Shakespeare is reputed to have drunk there. But if the White Horse is timelessly East End, the East End is itself changing. Not so long ago Redchurch Street was part of that old stereotypical London of the Ealing comedies and the kindly bobby. Now it is also home to a mosque, a Bengali grocery store, and, most recently, a cannabis museum. Located in a nondescript office building, the museum was opened amid some fanfare in April. Howard Marks—a graduate of both Balliol College, Oxford (politics, philosophy, and economics), and the American prison system (cannabis smuggling)—was the guest of honor. The press came, and so did the police. There are, of course, drug laws in Britain, and a wide range of "hemp" products was on display. Hemp? The police were wise to that alias. Hemp is also known as Cannabis sativa, a name it received, somewhat alarmingly, from the Emperor Nero's surgeon. No contraband was found, however. The hemp jeans passed muster. Even the revolting "Hemp 9," a "high energy protein mixed seed bar," was allowed. British law permits the manufacture of hemp products so long as they contain no more than 0.3 per cent tetrahydrocannabinol, hemp's narcotic element. Smoking a hemp T-shirt would be a waste of time; even Bill Clinton could inhale.

The police left satisfied, as well they might. For Redchurch Street is the acceptable face of cannabis. Part Ripley (George Washington grew it! Queen Victoria took it!), part agitprop vehicle, the museum is relentlessly upbeat. It is, after all, run by CHIC, the Cannabis and Hemp Information Club. The aim is to "inform and educate people about the history and many uses of this incredibly versatile plant."

Cheery, if occasionally misspelt (a side effect?), posters accentuate the positive. Cannabis, it seems, can be turned into mighty ropes, excellent paper, and an ecologically sound fuel. It can be used to treat glaucoma and relieve the nausea associated with chemotherapy. Fans of the former British foreign minister will be glad to know that cannabis "hurd" (its inner stalk) can be mixed with lime and water to produce a building material more durable than concrete. Finally, and this is a clinching argument in an era of anxious English mealtimes, hemp might make a healthier animal feed. Given that Britain's maddened cattle seem to have been subsisting on abattoir sweepings, this must be right. There have, after all, been no cases of stoned-cow disease.

Cannabis Museum, May, 1996 @ Andrew Stuttaford

CHIC makes an impressive case. Cannabis does indeed seem "incredibly versatile." So versatile, in fact, that visitors may feel a vague sense of resentment against this leafy overachiever—until, that is, they discover its little weakness. Cannabis is, as one display notes, also "a social intoxicant," safer perhaps than some of those available at the White Horse, but an intoxicant nonetheless.

And this, of course, is the source of the problem. It is the intoxication that enrages an officialdom that once warned (in a possibly misguided approach), that cannabis could lead to "weird orgies, wild parties, and unleashed passions." It is the intoxication that interests users. No one would risk jail time for something that was just a building material. It is unlikely that there will ever be, say, a stucco museum on Redchurch Street. With consumers enthusiastic and governments appalled, disaster was inevitable.

Cannabis Museum, May 1996  © Andrew Stuttaford

Sure enough, the saddest section of the exhibit describes the progress of the American war against cannabis, a miserable saga of mounting ferocity and futility. Prison photographs of the detained line the walls. They pose awkwardly with their families, standing in front of backdrops painted to give an illusion of somewhere, anywhere, other than the penitentiary. The faces, carefully selected no doubt, look innocent, and the injustice on display appears horrifying.

Wisely, perhaps, there is no discussion of cannabis's rougher associates: London will have to wait a while for a crack museum. The connection between the use of cannabis and of other drugs is never explored. Does one lead inexorably to the other, or are rising rates of hard-drug consumption an inevitable consequence of prohibition? NR discussed these sorts of issues a few weeks ago, but its rational approach would not win many friends in Redchurch Street. The museum's amiable staff may have been born too late for Woodstock, but they are hippies pur et dur, albeit with a Nineties twist: "Please respect our No Smoking policy."

Hippies were never too keen on logic. The positive impact of much of the exhibit begins to dissipate the moment one is told that smoking grass is part of the "permaculture." Indian spirituality makes its inevitable appearance. Wasn't that a poster of Ganesha, elephant god and popular head-shop deity, on the wall? Zany politics are also on view, most prominently in the shape of a large, unfinished, papier mâché display, in which a clumsily executed factory appeared to be menacing idyllic pasture. As artworks go, it was a shambles, but the message was clear: Industry is bad. We need to return to a simpler life, and hemp would show the way. "Industry" had, it was argued, played no small part in the banning of cannabis in the first place. There had, surprise, been a conspiracy. DuPont, no less, had been a force behind the original anti-cannabis legislation for commercial motives of its own (bleaching chemicals for pulp—it's a long story). As CHIC explains, "It is only when governments stop protecting the interests of the multinationals that we will be free to benefit fully from cannabis."

Well, maybe, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the museum's case for cannabis is getting muddled at this point. Some environmentally flavored Marxism seems to have been thrown into the mix. It does not belong there. At its core the argument for legalizing cannabis ought to rest on a fairly restrictive view of the rights and capabilities of government. This is not an approach normally associated with the paranoid Left—or the EPA, for that matter. A commissar is still a commissar, even if he does drugs.

Maybe this is just carping and the confusion is to be expected. We live, after all, in an absurd time, when even the medicinal use of cannabis is prohibited. An honest discussion of drug policy seems all but impossible. The Cannabis Museum does at least raise some serious questions. Perhaps it is too much to expect more. Since only the bravest politician will question prohibition, debate has, with notable exceptions, become the preserve of the eccentric and the obsessed. Meanwhile, drug-related problems worsen and the official approach will continue unaltered, unsuccessful and ugly.

Sadly, it will take more than CHIC to change this.