Dutch Consider Magic Mushroom Ban-Aug. 08, 2007

Wednesday, Aug. 08, 2007

Dutch Consider Magic Mushroom Ban
http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1650873,00.html
By Joost van Egmond/Amsterdam
Time Magazine

When Amsterdam police found a disoriented French tourist in his van last
month with his slain dog beside him, he told them he had wanted to free
the animal's mind. He also said he had ingested magic mushrooms, which
contain the hallucinogen psilocybin. The incident played into a running
debate over whether the Netherlands' famously liberal drug laws are too
lax with psychedelic mushrooms. Also in July, a Danish tourist raced his
car through a campsite, and a 19-year old man from Iceland jumped out of
a window; both had taken magic mushrooms, known in Dutch as "paddos," as
had a French teenager who jumped off a bridge to her death in March.

Since then, most parties in the Dutch parliament have been calling for a
clampdown on magic mushrooms. In dried form, the fungi are already
prohibited, but fresh mushrooms can still be legally sold in the
Netherlands. The country's public health minister, Ab Klink, has so far
steered clear of banning psilocybin mushrooms altogether, in part
because his ministry considers it legally problematic to ban a product
that grows naturally. But in May he commissioned fresh research into the
risks of "paddo" use, and has said he would consider the results, due
next month, in deciding how to act.

This being the Netherlands, critics say even that measured reaction is
too precipitous. They argue that while "paddo" use may have been
involved in serious incidents, it's too easy to single out the drug as
the cause of them. Municipal heath services determined that the man who
killed his dog had a psychosis unrelated to the drug, and the Danish
racer consumed alcohol and smoked marijuana before taking his "paddo."
Amsterdam municipal heath services report that the number of
mushroom-related incidents, while rising, is still dwarfed by problems
caused by alcohol. Advocates of a ban counter that the easy availability
of magic mushrooms amounts to an invitation to further tragedies.

There is general agreement, however, that foreigners seem to have more
trouble with 'shrooms that the Dutch themselves do. In Amsterdam, some
90 percent of ambulance dispatches related to magic mushroom use this
year were for foreign visitors, especially from Britain, trailed at a
distance by Italy, the U.S. and France. "Most problems are caused by
foreigners who come here on cheap flights to take as many drugs as they
can find," says Guy Boels, chairman of VLOS, an association of Dutch
magic mushrooms retailers. "They hardly sleep, they drink alcohol and
smoke pot as much as they can and then take a paddo on top of that."

Boels says the risks of reckless behavior are quite small as long as
paddos are not mixed with alcohol or drugs. Still, VLOS supports a
proposed regulation to ban the sale of the mushrooms to minors and calls
for a registration system to identify "weekend tourists." For now, that
watchful but tolerant approach is getting the endorsement of Dutch
public heath experts. Unless the new research commissioned by the
minister arrives at new insights, the government appears more likely to
play the regulation card than to support a total ban on magic mushrooms.