For Marks and his colleagues up in Liverpool, the Swiss report must have been vindication of a sort, but he was more concerned with the short range. “What will happen in Widnes? The gangsters will move in and we’ll have a situation like the no-go areas in Manchester or the Bronx.”

As they say in the lowlands, “God made Heaven and Earth, but the Dutch made Holland.” In the lobby of the City Hall in Amsterdam, there is a subtle reminder of that tiny nation’s ongoing battle with the Atlantic.  Rising two stories into the atrium is a slender glass column filled with water.  The level rises and falls during the day because the tube is connected to the coast at IJmuiden, and it shows how far above your head the surface would be if the dike broke.

This water column speaks volumes about the Dutch. When your enemy is the North Sea, it breeds respect for reality, and that has evolved into a national reverence for pragmatism. The Dutch are interested in what works, and that always takes precedence over what would be nice.  Among their more interesting departures from less flexible cultures is a legalistic loophole—the “expediency principle”—that might be called the rule of common sense. If a law turns out to be more trouble than it’s worth, they don’t enforce it.  It may remain on the books.  It’s just ignored.

To the ongoing horror of U.S. officials, one of the laws the Dutch have chosen to ignore is the law against marijuana. And though the Americans have unleashed a twenty-year barrage of invective at The Hague for their deviant behavior, the Dutch have yet to blink.  They did not come to this position lightly.  It was based on evidence, and given their history, it’s not likely that a moral argument will overwhelm their scientific measurements.

The origins of the Dutch heresy go back to the early ‘70s