Two countries took the drugs test. Who passed?
In Holland, there is no war on drugs. They believe this is a social problem, not a criminal one. And all the evidence suggests that their policy works

On the busy road which skirts Hoog Catherijne, a vast indoor shopping mall, the Stationsplein centre in downtown Utrecht looks like some kind of clinic. The walls are tiled, the floor is bright linoleum. There's a neat reception area and, four days a week, a nurse. Stationsplein's main business happens in a row of glass-fronted rooms, equipped with benches and sinks. In one of them crack addicts suck vapours from makeshift pipes; in another, heroin smokers chase the dragon. A final space is reserved for injectors. It goes without saying that their state-provided needles are clean.

Last week in Britain, some commentators were endorsing calls from the newly ennobled former New York mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, to jail cannabis smokers , and vilifying Brian Paddick, police commander of Lambeth, for telling an internet forum that the drug laws need reform. To arrive in Holland's fourth largest city is to cross a cultural chasm. First there is the obvious: like most Dutch towns, Utrecht, population 300,000, has its coffee shops, 40 of them, each selling dozens of brands of cannabis to smoke at the tables or take away. In Holland, ideas considered dangerously radical in Britain attract little controversy. 'There is no war on drugs in the Netherlands,' says Machel Vewer, a senior police detective who has spent the past decade working with addicts. 'What's the point of making war on part of your own country? Drugs are here and they're always going to be. This is a social problem, not a criminal one, and the whole of society has to tackle it - not leave it to the police on their own.
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