Regulate The Smartshops By All Means, But Parents, Educate Your Bloody Young.

August 9th, 2007

The media, in the US especially, is making much of the Dutch government’s moves to further regulate Smartshops and the sale of magic mushrooms, which are legal in NL if sold fresh but illegal if sold dried.

It doesn’t look good for the Smartshops:

AMSTERDAM � A 19-year-old tourist from Iceland jumped from a hotel window in Amsterdam last weekend after ingesting fresh hallucinogenic mushrooms. The boy suffered broken bones in both his legs and feet.

The Volkskrant reports this on Friday. This is the third serious incident involving hallucinogenic mushrooms in Amsterdam in a few months’ time.

In March a 17-year-old French girl jumped to her death from a bridge near the IJ tunnel after taking hallucinogenic mushrooms.

In June a 22-year-old British tourist lost control after taking the substance. He trashed his hotel room on the Martelaarsgracht in Amsterdam and threw items onto the street, injuring one passer by.

More…

Worse still, two smartshops in Amsterdam, Innerspace and Magic Mushroom Gallery, were found recently to have also been selling banned drugs like GHB and were shut down.

The Smartshops themselves, fearing a total ban on mushroom sales, propose strict regulation along the lines of that applied to coffeeshops:

VLOS, the National Association of Smartshops, now calls for regulation so that mushrooms will remain legally and safely available. The forthcoming points are proposed to the parliament.

1) No sale to minors.
2) Further professionalisation of the smartshops by means of a course for smartshop owners and staffs.
3) A general mushroom information flyer, in as many languages as possible.
4) Concentration of the sale of mushrooms in specialized professional shops that handle according to the rules, recognizable by a trademark.

All of which would be fine, if it weren’t for the bloody stupid tourists, none of whom seem to have the sense they were born with. They come to Amsterdam for a lost weekend of drink, drugs, dancing and hedonism and don’t seem to give a stuff about what they take with what and what the physical and mental consequences might be.

It’s as though they think because they’re somewhere foreign the normal rules about safety don’t apply. They’re on holiday! Nothing bad can happen! They are either totally irresponsible or woefully uninformed and ignorant. Who in their right mind takes hallucinogenics in the street anyway?

I don’t think mushrooms should be banned, although personally I don’t and wouldn’t take them. I’ve eaten them twice (long ago, I hasten to add), once inadvertently and once deliberately and I wouldn’t want to repeat the experience or the later flashbacks either.

Mushrooms strike me as something that should be taken only in very safe space in very specific circumstances, ie not at a Halloween costume party or busy streets full of bridges, cyclists and canals. Pirates+cutlasses+hallucinogenics=BAD, let me tell you.

Take it on holiday in the street? Next to an unfenced canal? On top of who knows what other intoxicants? That’s asking for trouble and trouble is what irresponsible 17 year olds do on the loose in a foreign city. Where were their parents anyway, and what did they teach her about drugs, if anything at all?

Personally I see it as Darwinism in action. Wise up about drugs and alcohol or die.

My condolences to the family, and 17 or 19 is no bloody age to die, but the teenagers in question could have just as easily fallen in a canal drunk as high. These are the sorts of things that happen when you let your irresponsible young travel unaccompanied: they do stupid things, some of them fatal. It could have happened to a hooray on a campsite in Cornwall, or a chav at a rave in Ibiza; youthful recklessness and stupidity knows no class or national boundaries.

But neither does the wilful blindness of doting parents when it comes to their children’s use of mind-altering substances. “No, not my little precious!”

What, they’d rather have them ignorant? And dead?

Athough there’s a chorus from the war on drugs folks for a prohibition, a complete ban on mushrooms is unfeasible: the genie is out of the bottle now and smartshops, drug tourism and the associated hotel and catering profits are big business. To ban the open sale of mushrooms will only push the trade underground and increase criminality The demand will still be there, someone will supply it, ban or no ban.

Strict regulation, licensing of sales and strong enforcement and public education will have to be the way forward, though any regulation will have to be a damned sight stricter than what the smartshops themselves propose if it’s to protect tourists agaisnt their own natural inclination towards being stupid bloody idiots.

Categories: Amsterdam, Dutch politics, Economy, Europe, Substance abuse

2 Comments

bjacques August 9th, 2007
Yes, and it sure is a coinkydink that these drugs death stories are getting a lot of play at the time UK Parliament are looking to reclassify pot as a hard drug and there’ve been rumblings here in NL over same.
Palau August 9th, 2007
I don’t think it’s a coincidence at all.

Sometimes I wonder if the vehemence of the War On Drugs is the backlash of a generation who see a world moving on to new and interesting kinds of hedonism without them. Or maybe it’s motivated by seeing a market they don’t control or benefit from and other people making money outside the system when they are taxed.

Bit of both, I expect.

But I do think parents are irresponsible if they don’t teach their kids about the realities of drugs, rather than just pretending they don’t exist and that young people aren’t actually young.

Prog Gold

Regulate The Smartshops By All Means, But Parents, Educate Your Bloody Young.

2 Comments

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