Legal Highs

The overriding memory of a recent trip to Amsterdam involves the pungent, sweet smell of grass lingering on the streets of this remarkable city built on water. The coffeeshops sitting on almost every commercial street lure tourists in for an experience legally denied at home. It’s peculiar  to see and smell grass being openly smoked in public but, on balance, an indication of Dutch maturity in their approach to the inhalation of what is essentially the smoke from a plant. Politicians elsewhere are so muddled in their attitudes that clear paradoxes are set up. Is Marijuana intrinsically any worse than alcohol? I certainly didn’t see weed fuelled aggression on the streets. I’d rather sit with a crowd of stoned people than drunks any day.

The problem arises with the way in which the plant is quite removed from what you might have smoked in the 1960s. Cultivation now takes place on an industrial scale and to meet demand unscrupulous growers seem intent on producing ever stronger highs so that it is reputedly becoming more dangerous particularly for the young and those susceptible to mental illness. A gentle trip to the moon that my parents might have enjoyed 40 years ago has been replaced by the effect of being shot into space on a rocket, which is not a pleasurable experience. One British resident of the Netherlands also told me that it was difficult to warn his children of the dangers since they were surrounded by coffeeshops selling freely available grass. It’s a fair point, but frankly having seen the Dutch solution in action, I suggest it’s still preferable to the absurd criminalisation and hypocrisy we see elsewhere in the world.

Don’t many of us simply share a common desire for honesty where we can discuss the merits and dangers freely without feeling condemned or complicit in something that’s been considered wrong because it’s labelled a ‘drug’? What’s not desirable is the almost global current state of affairs where politicians and police treat alcohol as a tolerable anomaly but bully and criminalise anyone wanting to puff a joint at home.