Imagine entering your local coffeehouse and ordering your favorite chocolate double mocha and a gram of marijuana. In Amsterdam, such imaginations are not just real, but commonplace. In many of the community coffeehouses, as much as 3 grams (a maximum amount regulated by law to deter foreign buyers) of marijuana can be purchased for personal use. The Dutch government focuses on preventing marijuana abuse rather than focusing on uber-moralizing marijuana use, quite different from the seemingly, in comparison tyrannical policies of US government. US government spends more time and money on campaigns utilizing scare tactics, and advocating as Donald Ian Macdonald, drug advisor during Reagan’s Administration puts it, “. . .[a] right to feel terror. . .” to attempt to eradicate marijuana use. In Amsterdam where marijuana is available more than anywhere else in the world, marijuana use is lower than in the United States, about 7 per cent compared to 13 per cent in the United States. In the Netherlands, there are no “mass media campaigns against drugs, and school-based programs do not use scare tactics or moralistic ‘just say no’ messages.” In fact, leaflets advising cannabis users to be responsible are distributed through the coffee shops. Few cannabis users in Amsterdam go on to harder drugs, such as heroine and cocaine, than in the United States where marijuana policies are much heavier and have a more moralistic, not scientific, approach to marijuana use. Lest you think it is only marijuana users who wish to decriminalize marijuana, in the 1970s, Nixon’s National Commission of Marihuana and Drug Abuse, commonly referred to as the Shafer Commission, as it was headed by former Governor Raymond Shafer of Pennsylvania, funded original studies and held hearings around the country trying to demythologize marijuana policy, which they concluded “had become more damaging to American society” than marijuana itself. The Commission found no evidential basis that marijuana caused insanity, crime, an amotivational syndrome, sexual promiscuity, or even that marijuana was a gateway drug to harder drugs. In 1982, committees of the Institute of Medicine and the World Health Organization backed the findings of the Shafer Commission. But the WHO and IOM were not the only organizations that agreed with the Shafer Commission. Mainstream organizations such as the American Medical Association, American Public Health Association, the National Education Association, and the National Council of Churches also endorsed the Shafer Commission and agreed that marijuana use was not dangerous. Medicinal use of marijuana is more beneficial to sufferers of appetite loss, nausea, and migraines than conventional prescription drugs, including Marinol, a synthetic THC capsule available by prescription, but not often prescribed by physicians out of fear of repercussions due to current marijuana laws and policies. Marijuana has been shown to reduce nausea in chemotherapy patients, increase appetite of patients with AIDS, and reduce pressure of the eye in glaucoma patients. But these people risk arrest and imprisonment if they use marijuana to alleviate discomfort of their disease, despite the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association’s endorsement of eliminating state and federal criminal penalties for marijuana possession and use. Imagine Grandma sitting alone in a cell because she wanted to alleviate the pain in her eyes for a few hours or Auntie punished by a fine of $1,000 and a year in prison because she wanted to stop the vomiting caused by chemotherapy. Are these people not in enough disease? More marijuana users are arrested and convicted for possession of marijuana for personal use than actual wholesalers and cultivators of cannabis, which only account for 5 per cent of marijuana-related arrests. Perhaps, it is not a question of decriminalizing marijuana, but why non-aggressive, non-violent cannabis smokers, most times using marijuana for personal use continue to be rounded up for possession of often less than the equivalent of one non-harmful, non-dangerous marijuana joint? What is, in actuality, the more deviant? Decriminalization or Criminalization? © Copyright 2008 Nicole Terry ALL RIGHTS RESERVED [back to Essays]  [more Writings]