Mayors on different sides of the border Holland-Belgium disagree when it comes to the issue of "drug tourism" across borders. For the Belgians who live in border cities like Lanaken, it seems, or some of them, they like to cross and visit the Dutch border cities like Maastricht and to patronize local cannabis cafes or "coffee shops" as they are known.

Obviously, the Belgians do not want marijuana near them or they would adopt a policy of "tolerance" for her too (though obviously some Belgians do want it, or would not be customers of the cafes), presumably, the Dutch want some tourism, but obviously do not want both of such as are now getting where you are receiving, as the municipal government has decided to move Maastricht several of the cafes in the city to the border. Belgian municipal authorities are not happy, but the Dutch feel that the Belgians should try their best marijuana policy themselves instead of actually sending large numbers of young people to his side where they have to deal with it.

We should have problems like that here. Some people have more spending time in a district that neighbors would like is a situation positively tame in comparison with the disorder and violence that accompany drug trafficking as manifested in the U.S., and border-Lanaken Maastricht is a real garden walk, compared to the danger and violence that are in (and out of) San Ysidro-Tijuana and El Paso-Juarez and Laredo-Nuevo Laredo. The U.S. border., Canada are not so scary, but neither is free of risks. (The TV series Twin Peaks used violence of drug trafficking across borders to the north as a key element in its twisted plot lines.)

Tolerance is not a perfect system of drug regulation without negatives. For example, I had the uncomfortable experience during a visit to Amsterdam, twice, to be followed in the street for blocks of small dealers who refused to accept "no" answer to his offer to sell drugs and my pleas to let me alone for whole minutes. The city of Zurich in Switzerland was a famous experiment called "Needle Park", where they established an area within a central public park that hard drug users could inject without being stopped and that the syringes and other health services were available. It became a big mess and was closed.
The experiment Needle Park is sometimes supported by the Prohibitionists as a failure of legalization, but really is not anything like that. The Park of syringes was legalized drug zone, was a park in the middle of a city where addicts across the country (and indeed the entire European Union because of open borders) gathered closely to inject illegal drugs - without being stopped by it, but looking them up in the black market and pay the high black market prices. Legalization means that the distribution and supply are legal and perhaps regulated, not merely that users are not being arrested. And we would not do that all involved with a drug in a park amontonasen mid-continent, people buy their drugs at authorized retail outlets (pharmacies or other stores) located in their own communities.

The problem of Lanaken-Maastricht is also an example of what legalization does, but policies that are radically different positions within the border jurisdictions. Belgium also can open cafes or regulate marijuana and other drugs in the same way and in so doing reduce the evils of drug trafficking in that way while sparing Dutch border towns the crowds do not want. Traffickers uncomfortable in Amsterdam could not believe I did not want to buy drugs no matter how I persecuted only because there were drugs in the supply side are still illegal even if they do not want to arrest users or small dealers objectify .

So it's important not to confuse the artificial problems suffered sometimes by cities or states or countries that have become islands of tolerance for anything that should be expected under a true post-ban. Senator Carlos Gaviria Diaz, former Constitutional Court president and current presidential candidate whose second position greatly increased his party (and speaker at DRCNet conference in Latin America in 2003) said the same when asked by the press during his campaign. "I am in favor of legalizing drugs, but I have knowledge that a government can not do this," he said last week. Legalizing the drug trade mean that the state can control it, "but Colombia would become a pariah country,". Legalization is something Colombia desperately needs, violence and drug corruption are literally destroying the country, but the nations of the world should end the ban together.

Therefore, I wish that Colombia will soon have the problems that the Netherlands are currently taking and the U.S. have those types of problems as well. They would be greatly preferred to the problems we're having now - which we accept for now, any day.

Bulletin Editorial extracted DRCNet written by David Borden, Executive Director, borden@drcnet.org the June 2, 2006.