{"id":1434,"date":"2021-01-22T15:47:39","date_gmt":"2021-01-22T14:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svjmedia.nl\/internationaljournalism\/?p=1434"},"modified":"2021-01-22T17:04:52","modified_gmt":"2021-01-22T16:04:52","slug":"could-xtc-shops-replace-amsterdams-coffeeshops-in-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svjmedia.nl\/internationaljournalism\/1434\/could-xtc-shops-replace-amsterdams-coffeeshops-in-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Could XTC-shops replace Amsterdam\u2019s coffeeshops in the future?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Friday night. You\u2019re planning on going to a festival with your friends. But first you take your bicycle and you take a trip to the \u2018XTC-shop\u2019. The cashier calculates exactly how much MDMA your pill needs to contain based on your weight and experience. The ingredients of the pill are listed on the packaging, which includes a leaflet as you would get with any other medication. You hand over your \u2018pill passport\u2019 in which your purchase is registered and you\u2019re on your way. Is this the future of ecstasy use in the Netherlands? According to a group of 18 different Dutch experts, it could be.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A police officer, a lawyer, a toxicologist, a philosopher, a pharmacist, a behavioural scientist and an anthropologist. It almost sounds like the run up to a terrible joke, but the opposite is true. These and more experts bundled forces and shared their knowledge in order to take a look at the current MDMA policy in the Netherlands. Together they looked at 95 possible MDMA policy options, which were scored on 27 different outcomes, like their effects on health, crime, ethics, environmental impact, degree of use, international relations and more. These outcomes were all weighed differently, with public health and crime at the top of the list.<\/p>\n

The goal of this \u2018ThinkTank\u2019 was not for the experts to give their own personal opinion, but to look at what would be the best policy, objectively speaking, explains Floor van Bakkum, initiator and Prevention Manager at Jellinek, which is the expert in Amsterdam when it comes to alcohol, drugs and addiction. She explains that it had been quiet on this policy front for a while and it was time to get the conversation going again. \u201cThe idea behind this system is that we want to judge the effects of different policy measures as objectively as possible. We\u2019ve seen in the past that more people have said that some sort of regulation could have positive effects on things like public health and crime, so the results weren\u2019t completely surprising, but because we broke it up in such small pieces, there was no telling exactly which way it would go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not all participants share in the results of the ThinkTank, however. The Dutch police publicly distanced themselves from the conclusion. Suzanne van der Graaf, police spokesperson, explains that they felt like the discussion focussed more on legalisation rather than combating crime. \u201cBeing police, of course, we\u2019re neutral, meaning we cannot agree with the idea of legalising ecstasy. We don\u2019t feel like we haven\u2019t been heard, but the results are not in line with our vision, we are in favour of a preventive policy, like the interception of drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Trimbos Institute for Mental Health and Addiction also announced that they did not share in the results, stating that they felt that their work was done after giving their input. \u201cWe see it as our role to highlight the various sides and positions and where necessary to provide the facts or data, like we did in the development of the ThinkTank\u2019s scoring tool, not to plea for \u2018the solution\u2019 or any particular model,\u201d said their spokesperson.<\/p>\n

According to Van Bakkum, agreeing or disagreeing with the results is not relevant. \u201cThe problem with an exercise like this, is that you don\u2019t know what the outcome will be. It doesn\u2019t really matter whether they agree with the outcome or not, what we needed was their input, like the input of the other experts. With that input we did our calculations and that\u2019s how these results came to be. We didn\u2019t go around asking everyone if they agreed with the outcome, because that wasn\u2019t the goal of this exercise.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked whether or not we could expect ecstasy shops to rise in coming years, Van Bakkum explains: \u201cIf there is a will, politically speaking, then it would be possible. But the problem is that this is often a sensitive and complicated subject. At the end of the day we\u2019re doing the same with cannabis now, that is something of which people used to say you couldn\u2019t regulate. These processes take a long time and of course there are hiccups along the way. We\u2019re not saying that policymakers need to copy the exact results from the ThinkTank, but we\u2019re trying to indicate that it can be good to think out of the box sometimes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tom Blickman, drug policy reform expert at the Transnational Institute (TNI) and one of the experts in the ThinkTank, is not amused when asked whether or not this solution could be realistic. “I find it very strange that people that come up with alternatives are always asked in what extent these are realistic, because in what extent is the current policy realistic? If you look at the amount of damage it brings, we should ask ourselves if this is really want we want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still not everyone is too excited about ideas like these. Ferd Grapperhaus, minister of Justice and Safety, said in a talk show<\/a> that people who talk about legalising hard drugs, don\u2019t realise that this would turn the Netherlands into the drain of the world. \u201cAll of these gangs from Colombia and Mexico would come over here to fabricate and distribute their trash.\u201d Grapperhaus is part of political party CDA (Christian Democrats), for whom regulation of soft (and hard)drugs is out of the question. \u2018We should not pretend like drugs are safe, instead we should prevent people from using drugs\u2019 it states on their website. That a change might be far out of reach, could also be concluded after watching a Vice NL interview from 3 years ago. Then (and current) Prime Minister Mark Rutte<\/a> (VVD) when asked about ecstasy policies said \u201cthis is such filthy crap, that [policy] is something that we will never change. Just because people want to kill themselves doing this, doesn\u2019t mean we should just facilitate it.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asking Van Bakkum what she thinks about the Netherlands becoming the drain of the world, she explains that doing this by ourselves is complicated. \u201cBecause the Netherlands is not an island, a policy like this would be very difficult to implement. The best way to go about this, would be if you worked together with other countries, starting a coalition. I don\u2019t think it would be very likely that the Netherlands would start a policy like this by themselves. Even now you can see that there\u2019s a global discussion that\u2019s starting to take place, questioning current drug policies, which often comes to the conclusion that something needs to change, because these policies just do not work.\u201d<\/p>\n[aesop_image img=”https:\/\/svjmedia.nl\/internationaljournalism\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/378\/2021\/01\/project-2021-01-22_09-01_AM.jpg” panorama=”off” imgwidth=”50%” align=”right” lightbox=”on” captionsrc=”custom” caption=”https:\/\/my.visme.co\/view\/dmdmvzg7-5-facts-about-ecstasy-in-the-netherlands ” captionposition=”center” revealfx=”inplace” overlay_revealfx=”off”]\n

Even though opening an ecstasy shop tomorrow might seem unlikely, this is not the end of the debate, but merely the beginning. It wasn\u2019t too long ago that the Utrecht fraction of political party D66 (Democrats 66) pleaded for a local experiment with ecstasy shops. Councillor Han Bakker stated that a shop like this would lie between a pharmacy and a liquor store, but for the sale of ecstasy. \u201cControlled products will be sold in limited user quantities, you get good information and you\u2019re not allowed to enter under the age of 18.\u201d D66 wants to put a stop to criminals\u2019 revenue model by regulating the \u2018least harmful\u2019 drugs, like cannabis and ecstasy. They are not alone in this, as political party GroenLinks (GreenLeft) states on their website that they think ecstasy and magic mushrooms should be legalised and that police capacity shouldn\u2019t be used against users of these substances.<\/p>\n

Blickman is hoping for a snowball effect to happen, the same way it did with cannabis. \u201cFirst Uruguay, then a number of American states, Canada and now more and more countries are discussing and considering the legalisation. Slowly but surely people are starting to realise we need to do it differently and if it happens with cannabis, other drugs will follow. Ecstasy would be the most logical next step, looking at the relatively low risk it carries.\u201d One thing is for sure, Blickman says: \u201cWhatever moral judgement you have against drugs, I think that rationally speaking we can all conclude that the current policy just simply does not work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s Friday night. You\u2019re planning on going to a festival with your friends. But first you take your bicycle and you take a trip to the \u2018XTC-shop\u2019. The cashier calculates exactly how much MDMA your pill needs to contain based on your weight and experience. The ingredients of the pill are listed on the packaging, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":1435,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cbj","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCould XTC-shops replace Amsterdam\u2019s coffeeshops in the future? - International Journalism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Could XTC-shops replace Amsterdam\u2019s coffeeshops in the future? - International Journalism\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It\u2019s Friday night. 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