Find the given quotations in the text and answer the following questions.

1. “Some 36 states have at one time or another passed bills allowing the medical use of marijuana, 28 of which remain on the statute books.”

What does this statement mean?

2. Try to work out how drugs are classified in the USA. What is meant by Schedule I, Schedule II, Schedule III?

3. “Cancer- and glaucoma-stricken Mainers caught puffing the weed will not be exempt from being arrested or charged under federal law; but the new state law … may cause prosecutors to think twice before indicting them.” How do federal and state laws work in such cases?

4. “Marinol is also expensive … and is not covered by health insurance.” What does that mean?

 

25. Read Article 2 carefully and find answers to the following questions.

1. Why was marijuana legalized in the Netherlands?

2. Did this measure work out as intended?

3. What was essentially peculiar in the attitude towards hard drug users in the Netherlands?

4. Why has the Netherlands become so attractive for organized crime?

5. What is peculiar about the Dutch rules of evidence? Why were such rules adopted?

 

Article 2

Playing by Dutch Rules

Ron Gerring missed the 1960s, but he figures he has found a scene almost as good in Amsterdam today. “I see Holland as having only two rules,” says the singer and songwriter from Toronto: “Don’t hurt anybody and don’t steal anything.” Then there’s the dope. “You don’t have to worry about the police, the window being closed or your mother coming back,” says Gerring, who is 39. “Yeah, this is hedonism.” He smiles and sips his Heineken. “Just short of debauchery, I think.”

Many of the Dutch government’s critics would agree, only they aren’t smiling. The Netherlands’ social liberalism – what a conservative columnist in Boston called “the Dutch Disease” – is often portrayed as radical, weird, just short of demented.

Dutch tolerance has become a magnet not only for free-spirited pot smokers but for organized crime. The Netherlands’ openness to commerce – Rotterdam bills itself as the biggest port in the world – makes contraband almost impossible to stop. As a result, the Netherlands is a centre not only for big-time drug dealers but for gunrunners from all over the world. “The problem,” says a prominent law-enforcement official in Rotterdam, “is that our laws are not adapted to this situation.”

The Netherlands’ decision to decriminalize marijuana dates to the 1970s. The intent was to separate it from hard narcotics, especially heroin, so that dealers pushing the first would not try to lure young customers to the second. At the same time, heroin and cocaine users were to be treated as patients rather than criminals. Today, as far as heroin is concerned, the policy has worked. According to the latest report by the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction, an EU agency based in Lisbon, the Netherlands ranks lower than Luxembourg, Italy, Britain, Spain, Ireland, France, Austria, Belgium and Denmark in proportionate numbers of heroin addicts.

But new drugs present new challenges. Ecstasy, or MDMA, the substance that fuels the frenzy at countless raves and house parties around the globe, is completely illegal in the Netherlands – and widely available. The country has also become the biggest MDMA supplier to Israeli and Russian gangs bringing millions of pills into the United States. Last year in a single operation with Dutch police, US Customs seized 2.1 million pills overnight from Amsterdam.

“Holland is a menace,” says an agent with the US Drug Enforcement Administration. But the basic problem isn’t its tolerance for drugs, it’s the rules of evidence meant to protect the rights of all defendants. Until recently, evidence gathered by undercover police or hidden microphones was strictly forbidden in Dutch courts, and it’s still illegal for Dutch cops to engage in the kind of tactics American narcs commonly use. They can’t work disguised as dealers or buyers. They are prohibited from participating in any drug transaction. Worse still, from the DEA’s point of view, the evidence it gathers using these techniques elsewhere in the world is not admissible in Dutch courts.

(From ‘Newsweek’, abridged)