I’ve never understood these half legalization laws. “Legal” consumption, illegal production. The same thing with prostitution laws were it’s legal to sell sex, but illegal to buy it.
Whatever.
With prostitution, it makes sense (if you want to criminalize it at all).
You don’t want to criminalize people who are often pressured into prostitution, because that would cut them off from getting help or going to the police if they are abused.
With weed, what the Dutch model tries to achieve is to not punish people for smoking weed, but also not turn it into a for-profit industry that would create an incentive to get more people addicted.
I think the German model is better in this regard: Let supply also be legal, but non-commercial. But they went overboard with the regulations (police can get a list of all consumers at any time, without a court order or criminal suspicion). And it looks like the decriminalization will fail at the last minute anyway.
With weed, what the Dutch model tries to achieve is to not punish people for smoking weed, but also not turn it into a for-profit industry that would create an incentive to get more people addicted.
It’s more that there’s a lot of conservative parties that do not agree on the drug policy. E.g. enough Christian parties who would rather be more restrictive.
AFAIK the Dutch model so far (consumption and sale somewhat allowed, but no growing or importing) has created huge criminal organisations that also started to do a lot of other crimes (bc what’s there to lose if you’re going to jail anyway basically) and a big goal in designing the new German law was to not mess it up like the Netherlands have
A lot of it has to do with the way Cannabis is treated at the EU-level. Some countries are trying to legalize it in a way that doesn’t conflict with existing regulations. That is also why it took Germany so long to approve their new legalization bill.
It’s to avoid criminalising the victims. A prostitute is in a bad financial situation. A customer exploits that: “don’t want to starve? Suck this dick bitch!”
It’s called compromise - kind of base of this whole democraticy thing we have going.
Oh what a great ‘compromise’, “you can take a bite of this cake but if you swallow I will punch you in the face”. This has nothing to do with democracy, democracy means you do what the majority of people want, not a half-assed, kinda-doing-it-but-also-kinda-not thing.
