Western European Governments Unmoved by Calls for the Legalization of Drugs

The debate in the United States over legalization of drugs is having little impact in Western Europe. Most governments on this side of the Atlantic favor even tougher drug laws, despite claims that severity only aggravates the problem.

Support for legalizing drugs appears confined to certain European law-enforcement officers and drug-rehabilitation workers, who argue that harsh laws encourage crime, help spread AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, and do little to cure addicts.

In Norway, “there is massive and unambiguous support in the Parliament, in the administration and in the population for our official hard-line policy,” said Ketil Bentzen, the government’s adviser on drugs. “A politician who would bring up legalization of drugs would at once be politically dead.”

A 1986 report by the European Parliament said heroin abuse has become “an epidemic of serious proportions” since the mid-1970s, and estimated there were 1.5 million heroin addicts in the 12-nation European Economic Community.

“The rapidity with which hard drugs, particularly heroin, have taken hold on all Western European nations is alarming,” the report said. It predicted a similar explosion in cocaine use.

The Parliament concluded that relaxed drug laws would encourage more addiction.

It urged greater cooperation among law-enforcement agencies in tracking down drug dealers in the United States, where several congressmen and mayors have suggested that the war on drugs is a losing battle.

For example, the Paris weekly Journal du Dimanche published reader reaction to an article by Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke in the International Herald Tribune. Schmoke has proposed congressional hearings on whether decriminalizing narcotics can reduce drug-related crime. The French newspaper found few in favor of relaxing the country’s drug laws.

But it quoted Georges Asap, prosecutor in the southeastern city of Valence, as saying: “In less than five years, the decriminalization of all drugs will be a reality. Simply because one can’t do otherwise. It’s been 30 years now I’ve been putting people in prison for using or selling drugs, knowing all along it served no purpose.”

Because of its relaxed attitude toward drugs, the Netherlands has become a haven for foreign addicts.

Amsterdam alone has an estimated 7,000 junkies, and drug abuse has become so entrenched that a bus circulates through the capital distributing free methadone. Addicts have their own union.

Although police turn a blind eye to marijuana, authorities are reluctant to legalize drugs outright.

Last year, the European Movement for the Normalization of Drug Policy was set up in the Dutch city of Rotterdam to muster support for legalized drugs. It now has representatives in 10 countries.

The group’s British representative is Dr. Russell Newcombe, a researcher for the Regional Drug Training and Information Center in the northwest port city of Liverpool, which has one of Britain’s worst drug problems.

Newcombe said in an interview that the group wants first to remove penalties for possession.

“We have patiently failed in our efforts over the past two decades to prevent the use of illegal drugs,” Newcombe said. “More importantly, we have failed to prevent the kinds of problems illegal drugs can lead to. Problems like AIDS and crime are not due to drugs, but to the fact that drugs are illegal and users are driven underground.”

But governments have kept cracking down. For example:

- The Swedish Parliament passed a bill May 19 outlawing not just drug possession but drug use.

- The British Parliament passed a law in 1986 empowering police and courts to confiscate drug profits and increasing the maximum penalty for trafficking from 14 years to life imprisonment.

- Norway doubled the maximum penalty for drugs offenses to 20 years in 1984.