drewdevault.com

Marijuana-reform-in-NL.gmi (5036B)

I have a personal problem: smoking tobacco.
In years past, I have smoked tobacco every now and then in social settings, but never developed a habit. However, when COVID rolled in, one of the only friends I ever got to spend time with during lockdown was a smoker, and after sharing cigarettes with them for a while, I developed a full blown tobacco addiction. Thankfully, I quickly realized what was happening and kicked it after a few months.
Apart from the occasional cigarette, I have had a casual relationship with marijuana for many years. Weed is much safer than tobacco, and it does not create a physical dependency like nicotine does. If you stop smoking weed, you don't get cravings, headaches, anxiety, depression, sleeping problems -- you just stop being high. In general, I do not view a responsible marijuana habit as a problem, at least nowhere near as problematic as tobacco use. I view it similarly to recreational alcohol use. And so, when I quit smoking tobacco, I did not quit my occasional marijuana use, since it was not a problematic substance for me.
Then I moved to the Netherlands. In the Netherlands, marijuana dispensaries are called "coffee shops" -- they don't sell coffee -- which was somewhat confusing when I was looking up somewhere to buy an espresso on my first day in Amsterdam. Being established as a casual marijuana user, in time I ended up visiting one to try out the famous Dutch weed.
For a start, I can tell you that the Dutch marijuana is pretty shit compared to the quality I was used to in America. But most importantly, it's usually mixed with tobacco, which I did not initially understand. I had noticed that the quality was kind of shit, but my first real impression that something odd was about was when I noticed that I was /craving/ marijuana, which had never happened to me before. Well, a quick internet search later provided me with the answer. I had successfully kicked a nascent tobacco habit just to be jumped with it a few months later.
At the time of writing, I am once again smoking tobacco regularly, though I feel reasonably optimistic about my odds of beating it again. New legislation in the coming years will make this a lot easier - it will soon be illegal to sell tobacco products over the counter, and smokers will have to order online. But, given my environment, I will also have to quit weed to make sure it sticks.
Importantly, this experience has also generally drawn my attention to the problems of the soft drug industry in the Netherlands. I was surprised to learn from my neighbors that, a few months before I moved in, one of the apartments in my neighborhood was raided for their marijuana growing operation! When there are two coffee shops within 100 meters of my apartment that I can just walk into and buy marijuana!
In the Netherlands, soft drugs are in a bizarre legal grey area that introduces a lot of problems. Possession of marijuana and sale in small amounts is legal, but production and sale of large amounts is illegal. Coffee shops usually get away with their sales, but the cops frequently bust growing operations. The legal persecution of the supply chain causes the industry to be tied up with organized crime, human trafficking, and slavery, as well as many other implications which are equally grave. It's horrible.
Furthermore, the government tolerates only the sale of certain marijuana products, namely unrefined products. That essentially limits coffee shops to the sale of flower (the actual dried plant), hashish (the active parts of the plant rolled into a waxy substance), and edibles. In the United States, you get a much greater variety of products such as waxes, oils, and shatters, which are useful for vaporizer use, and can allow you to better tune the strength of the substance so that you don't have to dilute it with tobacco to avoid getting blasted. Though marijuana is soft-legalized, a black market still exists here thanks to these gaps in the semi-legal market.
I should note that there are some Americans who, at least historically, moved to Amsterdam for access to the soft drug market. I am not one of them, and if drugs were outlawed here I still would have moved here. But the famous liberal drug industry in the Netherlands is a fucking disgrace, and the Dutch should be ashamed of it. The Netherlands has addictive, inferior products, proffered by a supply chain painted in blood, that persecutes the have-nots to give the haves a little bit of pleasure. The Dutch drug policy is a bad joke. In the United States, I could be rest assured that the weed I bought in a dispensary in Colorado was coming from a licensed farm in Colorado, I had access to a wider variety of products, and the only tobacco you'd find in an American dispensary is likely to be in the pockets of any smokers who happen to be there.
The Dutch system needs to be reformed. The supply chain needs to be legalized and audited, the permissible products expanded, and the tobacco needs to go.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.