Decriminalization of drug use is a step in the right direction, but will not stop the War on Drugs, experiences in the Netherlands show.

To explain why, let’s take the case of soft-spoken Dutch weed grower Doede the Jong.

In a country known for its liberal stance on marijuana, De Jong acquired a peculiar celebrity status when a documentary from 2009 called ‘Nederwiet’ showed him in and out of court for the cultivation of organic, greenhouse-grown cannabis. See, the Dutch system allows the sale of cannabis in so-called ‘coffeeshops’, but it wants to adhere to international treaties from that point on. So the possession of large quantities, trade and production of cannabis are all strictly prohibited.

Doede was found guilty of growing weed in court multiple times, but got exempt from punishment because the court ‘didn’t have the idea he did it to enrich himself’. His troubles are not over yet, it is unclear if he has to pay 250.000 euro the prosecutor has said he earned with his grow. An amount De Jong says is wildly exaggerated.

De Jong is a likable character, and he exposed — with organic and sustainable flair — a central flaw in the Dutch system: every drug user in the Netherlands has to get their product from an illegal market. In the forty years that passed since the Netherlands introduced this system, people like Doede were pushed into the shadows. And in those shadows, the hippies started losing out against people who solved problems with other methods than just smoking a peace pipe.

But Doede was the only one willing to talk about his fate openly — others just kept their mouth shut or quit altogether. De Jong was trying to use the media to direct attention to the fact that 1/4 of the adult population of the Netherlands has tried cannabis at least once, but that all of that weed was essentially grown illegally. A product he believed to be positive for society.

Many people would disagree with that last statement. Not just cannabis, but all illegal drugs are considered inherently bad for people. Not just bad, but a scourge, causing endless suffering and the devastation of many lives.

Recently, I started an English-language show about drugs called Controlled Substance. It tries to show the clash between drug culture and drug policy from a Dutch perspective, and uses science as its guide.

But now that there seems to be an ever-growing consensus that the War on Drugs has caused so much needless suffering as well, I realized we had an obligation to examine how bad these drugs themselves actually are. So I’ve been researching drug culture and drug policy in the Netherlands for a few years now, and I’ve seen that most of this debate still rests on many misconceptions from a time when we — and only a handful of other countries — hadn’t figured out yet how to tackle these issues yet.

What I’ve seen in Amsterdam, a city whose name is almost synonymous with drug use, is that good education and open discussion have nurtured a populus which uses drugs in average numbers compared to the rest of the world, but where problems with drugs occur much less often than elsewhere.

There were a 170.000 cocaine users in the Netherlands last year, but on average only 32 (!) of them saw a health professional with a ‘severe’ intoxication, and 224 cases per year were ‘light’ or ‘moderate’. That’s not 0, but one can ask if this drug inherently causes really such an uncontrollable mayhem that it’s worth all the suffering in South- and Central America. Of course it would be better if these 170.000 consumers stopped pumping money into that war, but maybe it’s just better to accept that they exist so we can end the war altogether.

Dutch drug policies created a country that made the following line from the National Drug Monitor a reality last year: “There were almost no recent or actual users of heroin”.

How a Christian priest came up with the word ‘ecstasy’ for MDMA, and how nobody understands what ‘molly’ is.

And of the 270.000 people who used ecstasy in 2014 in the Netherlands, only 100 checked themselves in to addiction care because they said they needed help to kick it. And we’re not talking cold turkey rehab here, but people who just received some form of care for addiction.

These numbers are some of the lowest in the world. And they are almost so shockingly low, that one should ask why those other 269.900 aren’t speaking up. Because they are using these drugs with little trouble.

What I’ve seen, is that drug consumers themselves have been reluctant to come out as people who ‘use’, because the stigma is gigantic. In that regard, the Netherlands is little different from the rest of the world. Illegal drug use is seen as a hedonistic past time not worthy defending at best, a moral failing worthy of ridicule at worst. And the only people who gain access to the public consciousness, are the ones that hit rock bottom on reality shows.

And so I’ve come to realize that there is an important group missing from the debate about the War on Drugs: the actual drug consumers themselves who do so with little trouble. In a worst case scenario, they’re seen as evil, lazy and spineless. In the best case scenario, they’re treated like patients in need of help.

And this Dutch situation — where drugs are widely used but cause relatively little harm compared to elsewhere — is so vastly different from the rest of the world, that I know that I risk coming across as a radical. But I’m just citing numbers from a government-sponsored institution here (The Trimbos Institute).

This journalistic research journey has been vastly surprising to myself as well. The science of the drug regulation movement checks out, but the rhetoric of the status quo — prohibition — consistently doesn’t.

In the end, the other side of this debate will always point at health risks. That doing drugs is dumb because it’s unhealthy. That’s a fine position to have and a perfect reason to never do them if you don’t want to. But the question is not if you and I want to do them, but if we think someone else has the right to do so.

The fact that international treaties answer a firm ‘no’ to that question, no matter how little the risk of some of these substances actually carry, has caused a war that has now been going on for forty years, if not a hundred if you go back to the earliest treaties. And it’s a war that continues even in a country that has taken care of its users like my own. Luckily not anywhere on the scale that other places of the world have seen, but the underlying misguided system is the same.

The legalization movement shouldn’t look at alcohol regulation as an example, but as a warning.

Even in the Netherlands the government spends about 1 billion euros a year fighting drug production and trade, and are people like Doede de Jong not allowed make a living by simply providing a product a lot of people ask for. We’ve decriminalized possession and consumption, but we bust down doors of other sectors of this industry.

I have seen no one in the regulation movement speak of freely handing out drugs to anyone who pleases whenever they want to, caricature only voiced by those who are unable or unwilling to see past the horizon. But there are interesting ideas out there that try to treat every drug on its own merits instead of a blanket ban for all of them except alcohol and tobacco.

When the United Nations convenes this April to talk about the future of the drug war, the best case scenario to come out of it will be a decriminalization of consumers Dutch style. Besides the fact that it almost seems Utopian to think other countries are ready to go down that route — especially for substances other than cannabis — experiences in the Netherlands show that turning a blind eye to consumption alone will not lead to lasting peace in the Drug War.

Tice Roose is a journalist and historian from the Netherlands, who recently started a English-language show about drugs on Youtube called Controlled Substance. Some of the videos are embedded in this article. It tries to show the clash between drug culture and drug policy, and uses science as its guide.