Prohibition doesn’t work!

Back from Amsterdam (in Chicago, waiting for a flight to Cleveland), and wondering along with Bob Herbert when we’re going to give up our “war on drugs.” It never did seem to make a lot of sense to me to deal with what it seems isprimarily a medical problem as one to be solved through the criminal justice system. I thought we’d learned better from our experience with Prohibition. As Herbert writes, “The stakes are huge, the uncertainties great, and there’s a genuine risk that liberalizing drug laws might lead to an increase in use and in addiction. But the evidence suggests that such a risk is small.” And, after all, what we’ve been doing through most of my life has been a colossal failure:

This year marks the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s start of the war on drugs, and it now appears that drugs have won.

“We’ve spent a trillion dollars prosecuting the war on drugs,” Norm Stamper, a former police chief of Seattle, told me. “What do we have to show for it? Drugs are more readily available, at lower prices and higher levels of potency. It’s a dismal failure.”

What real biking culture looks like.

As I wrote yesterday, the fact bicycling is the best and most popular way for Amsterdamers to get around their own city is one of the greatest pleasures I take in living here, even for the brief times I’ve been able to each of the last 3 years. It shouldn’t be surprising, therefore, that Amsterdam is leading the world in pursuing green urban planning. But for green Americans, the reality may not be exactly what they would conceive. Not only, as I wrote yesterday, do you ride a cheap, single-speed, fat tired, rusty and old bike and buy and use locks heavier than your backpack and more expensive than the bike itself, but you don’t wear a helmet, you carry people — often in the plural, and often of very tender ages — on whatever protrusion they fit on. And they, of course, don’t wear helmets either. You ride at any hour of the day or night, and you don’t hesitate to speak on your cell phone while you’re riding.

It’s the honest truth from one who is here. And if you don’t believe me, you can check out “82 pictures of bicycles taken during 73 minutes on 9/12/06 in Amsterdam, Netherlands.”

Bicycling is, by the way, the most energy efficient means of transportation, more efficient even than walking.

The Greening of Amsterdam

One of the joys of living in Amsterdam is the opportunity to bike everywhere and at any time. The city is built for and entirely operates around the predominance of bicycles as a means of transportation. It’s not U.S. bicycling, with expensive bikes and helmets. You ride one-speed junker bikes that no one wants to steal, but the city is small and flat, so you don’t care much.  But Amsterdam wants only to become greener and more energy efficient:

The City of Amsterdam has selected Accenture to help implement its ‘Amsterdam Smart City’ program and create the European Union’s first ‘intelligent city.’ The purpose of the Amsterdam Smart City program is to take a comprehensive and coordinated approach to developing and implementing sustainable and economically viable projects that help the city reduce its carbon footprint and meet the European Union’s 2020 emissions and energy reduction targets.

And Amsterdam, apparently, is on the cutting edge of energy efficiency in urban planning. According to Business Week, “unlike cities that could take decades to upgrade their infrastructure, Amsterdam aims to complete its first-round investments by 2012. That makes it one of the first and most ambitious adopters of the smart city concept, attracting attention from policymakers worldwide hoping to glean lessons from the green experiment.” Just last week, on Utrechtsraat, a major shopping avenue in the center of the Dutch capital not far from where I am living, electric trucks have begun to pick up the trash, and the electronic displays on the local bus and tram stops are powered by small solar panels. “Elsewhere, 500 households will pilot an energy-saving system from IBM and Cisco aimed at cutting electricity costs. An additional 728 homes will have access to financing from Dutch banks ING and to buy everything from energy-saving light bulbs to ultra-efficient roof insulation.”

Tulips and Weed

So now I’m in Amsterdam, getting ready for my first class tomorrow, and still recovering from jet lag. The weather helps considerably. Clear blue skies and not a bit of humidity, hot in the sun and cool in the shade. They say exposure to sunlight helps reset one’s circadian rhythms. I’m hoping so.

Invariably when Amsterdam and law come up together in conversations in the States, it’s in a conversation about drugs and/or prostitution. I suppose those are subject worth delving into, but they’re not terribly important ones when it comes to comparing two cultures through their law and legal systems. Or, rather, they’re symptomatic, not central. There is a social libertarianism in Amsterdam openly dismissive of religious moralism to a degree that would be politically suicidal in conventional U.S. political conversation. But I think that social angle is just one of many. Social libertarianism is one thing. Economic libertarianism is something else entirely, and I think I can explore the ways the Dutch seem to both be adept at Western capitalist enterprise (they did, after all, virtually create international banking) and at the same time to maintain successful socialized systems of education and health care financed by a high tax rate. There are ways, I think, the Dutch both respect and fear the power of capitalist markets because of a longer history of and memory for their successes and their failures. Who could forget the Dutch Tulip Craze?

Off to Holland I go . . .

I’m off to Amsterdam Thursday to teach U.S. Contract Law to 22 brilliant Dutch students at the University of Amsterdam. It’s the third consecutive year I have had the pleasure to do so. Who knew that Ruth Bader Ginsburg taught at UvA too?