to be fair this didn’t happen overnight – there were proper democratic debates across all their levels of govt for about a decade. and it wasn’t just the fault of NL, they paid the price for doing something early and there wasn’t consensus in the EU about decrim (it did come close in the 90s)
just consider what would happen in your country if IE decriminalise ddrugs but the UK didn’t. it might be fun for a few years until the UK gangsters/paramilitaries wanted a piece of the action.
OK NL doesn’t have bad territorial disputes since a few centuries (they did have war with BE) but there are some pretty hardcore gangs there some aligned along ethnic/religious lines which has the potential to actually destabilise areas.
also the coffeeshops fucked it up for themselves as they didn’t pay their taxes properly and one part of the bargain was they did this to fund public health care/research into drugs.
I can read enough Dutch to look at the crime section of local news and there is just as much drug-related crime in many parts of NL as there is in similar areas of the UK. The idea of the coffee shops was to reduce this..
