Why weed wasn’t wasting wisdom

Or the difference between correlation and causality.

It may not shock many of you that, given I reside in Holland, I have been acquainted with cannabis and the use thereof. However, where I’m living a new trend has manifested itself. A new wind is blowing out of the political corner and sweeping coffeeshops away with it. Of course I feel coffeeshops need to be regulated and well organized, but this new governing hurricane reeks of hypocrisy and easy points, because we can’t ignore the current developments on the political front when looking at this case. First things first however, what’s this so called situation?

When dealing with cannabis in Holland, the first thing one needs to realize, is the legality of cannabis it Holland, because contrary to popular belief, it isn’t.

Well it is, sort of, but not really. Weed isn´t really legal, it´s tolerated. It´s permitted to have with you and in some public areas you may even smoke it, like some parks and most coffeeshops, but certainly not everywhere. The most important thing is to make sure you don´t harm or bother anyone else with it. The eating of baked goods is, as far as I know, not prohibited in public, as long as you´re not driving or operating heavy machinery et cetera.

You may also carry up to five grams (roughly a sixth of an ounce) which may be legally bought at coffeeshops, if you are over eighteen (or twenty-one, differing between cities and shops).

However and this is where it starts to get complicated, coffeeshops can’t legally buy large quantities of weed because it’s illegal to grow more than five plants per person and it’s illegal to use specialized lighting to do so. This is known as the “back-door paradox”, because as soon as the weed is inside the coffeeshop, it’s ‘legal’ , but it’s utterly illegal beforehand.

As of yet the Dutch government hasn’t addressed the matter properly and continues in its failure to do so, evidently believing this mechanism to work just fine.

It isn’t however, because the government leaves the enforcement of the toleration of weed to individual cities, leaving an inability to deal with the problem on a higher level, nationwide, and forces municipalities to enforce rules and regulations which they may not even agree with.

The latter is the cause for the current situation, because a few years back, the government decided that weed is bad for children, to which I agree, and they shouldn’t be stimulated to use it at a young age.

To carry this belief, municipalities, mine in particular as a pioneer on this front, started closing down coffeeshops within a 250 m (roughly 275 yards) of high schools. These shops were closed down in particular because it was believed that the high rate of high school drop outs (1 out of 5 kids in my area aren’t finishing high school) and it was believed to be a weed-related issue.

There are of course studies which show weed and the ability to concentrate are correlated and studies that don’t.

And even if it does  correlate, the figures don’t work out. Of the 1 out of 5 people who dropped out of high school, most probably don’t use weed.¹ So even if weed was banned altogether, the problem of high school dropouts wouldn’t be fixed, regardless of the supposed successes of prohibition, but that’s a whole other story. Let’s say that 1 out of 2 high school dropouts use weed on a (semi-) regular basis, making the statistics that for every 9 high schoolers there is one dropout who uses weed and one who doesn’t.

Now, hear my true point. Because even though one of the dropouts may use weed, it simply isn’t said that weed causes his poor grades. In my experience, there are two kinds of people who use weed. People who do it because their bored and people who do it because they want to have fun.

Typically, people differ not only in the reason for using weed but also in lifestyle. We all know the two stereotypes when weed is concerned, the hippy/bohemian/new-agey stoner or your basic, munchying, absentminded pothead.³ The latter are usually characterized by not achieving much and a little concentration even before starting to use weed, but large numbers of people who are low-achievers with zero-concentration turn to weed at some point because they feel bored and hope to achieve something with smoking or simply want to get high.

The more new-agey type stoner however are mostly people who know what’s going on in the world and are eager to learn about it (or, more often, make up their own version of events). They turn to weed as a psychedelic or mind-altering  substance or are simply looking for the key for their next chakra, having a boy scout like obsession with them, as if they were insigna.

My point being of course that in the first group of users weed correlates with low concentration abilities but doesn’t cause them (how can one lose what one doesn’t have) and the latter group are rarely encountered among high schoolers and even if they are, rarely in the lower-sectors of the educational system⁴ , even though these sectors were explicitly named as the sectors most viable for improvement.

Further show of how little was thought about this plan, was a statement made by the mayor, saying he was ‘happy with the results’ , mere months after the closing of the coffeeshops. The plan of closing the coffeeshops can’t have had real effect in a few months and can hardly be said to be promising to yield results in the future, because the current generation of high schoolers already know about weed and its effects and will continue to use or abuse it because of that.

The real results can be booked in around four years’ time (when most of the current generation of high schoolers, if not all, have moved on to bigger and better things) when a new generation will roam the high schools, who can and perhaps now will be kept away from drugs longer.

Because in the end, I don’t think these shops were in a good spot, but they should have been relocated, not closed, and closing coffeeshops further away from schools will not help  improve school results.

And I hope to have maybe, in the tiniest of ways helped shaped the (Dutch) prejudices about weed and help create a more weedtolerating society

P H B Gaber

Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam