Rep.
Souder
Explains
Dutch
Drug
Policy:
"They
Don't
Have
a
Moral
Base"
11/23/01
Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN), most notorious for authoring the the anti-drug amendment to the Higher Education Act, is taking full advantage of his position on House Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-IL) Taskforce for a Drug-Free America to crisscross the globe on sight-seeing, "fact-finding" junkets. Comments made by Souder following his most recent trip, however, were so non-factual as to probably not have been worth the taxpayers' expense. Souder recently returned from Amsterdam, but the tenor of his remarks about the Dutch suggest that he learned nothing on the trip. Even the basics appear to have eluded the Indiana congressman. Seeming to believe that the Dutch live in some sort of libertine hippie utopia, Souder told his hometown newspaper, the Journal Gazette, that Holland features "free pot and free prostitution and gambling and porn videos all over the place." "Where?" asked DRCNet staffers who have traveled to Amsterdam but never encountered such things. "Maybe the congressman gets free pot and free sex, but not the rest of us," they complained. The Dutch are tolerant of pornography, especially in Amsterdam's red light district, and houses of prostitution are regulated by the state. But prostitution is a business, not a charity, and a prostitute's services are not free. Likewise, small-scale sales of marijuana and hashish in coffee houses is tolerated as a harm reduction measure by Dutch authorities, but again, no one is giving cannabis away in Amsterdam. Souder told the Journal Gazette Dutch decadence was "their business," but when Holland's liberal drug laws led to a surge in ecstasy imports to the US, that's another matter. He said Dutch officials attempted to persuade his delegation that US drug laws were too restrictive, but the stolid Souder remained unswayed. "I found their arguments non-compelling," he said. The Dutch suffer from a lack of religiosity, he explained. "I believe they are trying to do the right thing," he said, "but there is a huge difference in how we approach issues. We have a more moral base; they don't have a moral base." Less than 20% of the Dutch population attends church regularly, he said. Nice figure -- too bad it's wrong. According to a cross-country comparison of weekly church attendance completed this summer, 35% of Dutch and 44% of Americans attended church regularly. The European country with the lowest rate of church attendance, Sweden with 4%, is Europe's staunchest drug warrior state (http://www.sase.org/conf2001/papers/gomez-lipset-meltz.pdf -- thanks to Common Sense for Drug Policy's Doug McVay for tracking down the study). Souder's comments on Holland are only his latest fulminations on drug policy. Last March, during hearings on the medical marijuana issue, Souder, called a representative of the Marijuana Policy Project "an articulate advocate of an evil position." Souder has also been quick to jump on the drug-terror bandwagon. "The September 11 attacks on our country immediately highlight the dark synergies between narcotics trafficking and international terrorism," he told the House Government Reform subcommittee examining drug trafficking and terrorism. Souder chairs that committee. Earlier, Souder traveled to the Andean Parliament drug trafficking summit in Caracas, Venezuela, to defend US supply-reduction and interdiction policies against Latin American critics. At the conference, Venezuelan Vice President Adina Bastinas asked whether "rich countries" should not shift spending priorities to domestic demand reduction, and Venezuelan Interior Minister Luis Miquilena worried that Plan Colombia would lead to spillover coca production and political violence in his country. "We understand that drug production in Colombia will spill over," Souder told his hosts. "But we argue that the biggest threat to Venezuela is not getting control of coca production in Colombia," he said. Besides, he added, the US is taking steps to reduce consumption at home. The two he mentioned were his pet Higher Education Act anti-drug provision and programs to encourage private companies to drug test their workers.
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