Drugs and alcohol - can we learn from the Dutch?

Lowestoft beach in summer

At the moment I am in the very privileged position of living in two completely contrasting parts of the country. Beardy Man and I both have houses in Lowestoft but, for work, Beardy Man rents a tiny, one-bed flat in Abingdon that we have affectionately christened Chateau Shoebox. I love both these towns in different ways.

In Lowestoft, between us we have an obscene number of bedrooms and so we both take in lodgers.

Last week, we had just got back from a long weekend in Amsterdam when we had to make an unscheduled trip to Lowestoft to sort out lodger problems in Beardy Man’s house. Alcohol related problems. This was Beardy Man’s first bad experience with lodgers and alcohol. I have had a couple:

1.       Miss A. who didn’t let on that she had just left rehab. She relapsed within a couple of days, took to her bed, and got up ONLY to get more alcohol. Within a week we had had her key worker, the police and finally an ambulance arrive. She ended up in hospital having nearly died and stayed there while she dried out. Her parents replaced the mattress that had been used as a toilet and, when we visited her in hospital, she was very contrite and determined to stay sober. So I did the only sensible thing and let her come back to my house!!!!

Jekyll & Hyde effect of alcohol

She didn’t destroy another mattress but soon started drinking again and quickly found another place to live. I wrote a totally true but utterly misleading reference and heaved a sigh of relief. Until her new landlord turned up on my doorstep. Querying the reference (gulp!) She had once more taken to her bed…He was not happy. Fortunately, when I came to the door in my electric wheelchair (called Davros) he calmed down. Sometimes disability has its advantages!

2.   Mr S – the binge drinker. He would be fine for weeks then would get scarily strange and argumentative before going on a bender. I only saw him really drunk once and that was enough. He was saying really creepy things like something from a horror film. He left suddenly. No forwarding address. No notice. Just a nice trail of vomit down the side of the bed.

So when Miss M came round for a chat about renting a room and told us that she was sofa surfing and had had problems with alcohol, I gagged my inner mug and didn’t offer her a room in my house. Beardy Man, still having faith in mankind, gave her a chance. She blew it. Within three weeks she had got drunk and become verbally aggressive and threatening to one of the other lodgers and scared another by shouting in the middle of the night about stabbing people.

She was sober when she was asked to leave and totally resigned to this outcome. Apparently the same thing has happened a dozen times. She thanked us both(!) for giving her a chance and left within two hours.

The tragedy of this is that, when sober, all three of the alky lodgers were really lovely people. Alcohol changed them completely. A total Jekyll and Hyde syndrome.

Who knew Neil from The Young Ones
was a Dutch footie fan?

In Amsterdam we encountered a lot of cannabis users – late evening was a bit like a zombie apocalypse (only the zombies were too stoned to be anything other than friendly.) Holland were playing the World Cup 3^rd place play off and there were many football supporters in evidence. We watched the game in a weed-tolerant bar and, when the Netherlands won, there was a ripple of applause. I suspect if they had lost the reaction would be the same, with perhaps the addition of a disappointed sigh. My brother would have made more noise alone in his lounge. We saw very few police and felt completely safe, both on the streets and on public transport, in the wee small hours of the morning (apart from crazy stoned cyclists and getting wheelchair wheels stuck in tram lines.) Soho on any night, let alone an important football match night, is swarming with police and strategically placed police vans, while the general noise and hubbub is punctuated by screaming sirens.

The cannabis museum in Amsterdam describes at great length the many health benefits of the drug (brushing over memory loss and poor concentration as trivial side-effects!) and I know people who have used weed to manage chronic pain (it seems to be particularly good at dealing with the symptoms of Crohn’s Disease) when prescription drugs have failed.

My point? Alcohol can cause such a variety of social problems and yet budget after budget it escapes massive taxation and, in fact, laws have changed so that we can get hold of alcohol far more readily. Cannabis remains illegal. Have we got this right? Please comment. I’d like to know your views.