Only tulips and wooden shoes for tourists, no more weed

We Dutch! We are so quirky. We speak funny, especially when we try to speak another language. We walk on wooden shoes when picking the tulips from our neatly kept front gardens and we smoke dope all day. Our claims to fame in a nutshell.

And we like to keep it all to ourselves, the weed that is. The tulips and wooden shoes we export like crazy. But the weed is for our own private use: the government will not make an exception for Amsterdam in its plans to introduce passes for the use of coffee shops. Coffee shops are the shops where weed is sold, besides coffee. These passes are introduced to keep tourists from stocking up on weed just before the trip home.

I suspect the main reason for this is that every time any one of our dignitaries visit a foreign country, fellow dignitaries bombard them with recriminations for the laxness of our drug laws. They are accused of perverting the brains of all those foreign innocents falling victim to the easy availability of weed in our country.

So I imagine an uncomfortable silence falls when our new prime minister, visiting the Palais de l' Elysées in Paris, is asked over an after dinner cognac, to curb the amount of weed flowing into France through Maastricht. The uncomfortable silence may of course also have to do with the fact that a French dinner is invariably fortified by a few bottles of magnificent, yet innocent claret. If we had a real strong willed and brave prime minister he might retort with a subtle pointer at the amount of brains that are fried by French wine all over the world. But alas, we have lacked such a prime minister for quite some time now.

No, instead our government decides you have to prove you're Dutch to be able to buy weed at a coffee shop. Weed is for the Dutch, tulips and wooden shoes are for tourists, wine is for everyone. Cheers!

Teens who text a lot live unsafe lives, a study claims

A study done by the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland shows that teens who text a lot (more than 120 messages per school day) and who spend a lot of time on social networks (more than three hours a school day), are more likely to lead unsafe lives. Unsafe, in the eyes of the researchers means they drink alcohol, use drugs and OMG, have sex! The calamity! High school students who drink, smoke weed and fool around with each other. This must be the end of the world.

At first my reaction was to laugh. I looked at the calendar, no it was not April fools day. So was this research real? What got my goat most was the blatant reversal the researchers allowed themselves. They warned parents that excessive - in their eyes - texting and social networking caused all these debaucheries. Which of course is total poppycock to put it mildly.

I remember my high school days, although they are some time ago. We did not have social network sites and mobile phones. They were not even a gleam in the eyes of their unborn inventors. Yet I do remember the socially more active specimens of my age group being a tad more precocious than some. They smoked, drank and screwed around at 16. Others did not. Live and let live. Had a study been done in those days they would have shown much the same results percentage wise. You see, there's one line in the report that gave the game away: "Many of the 19.8 percent of teens who reported hyper-texting were female, minority, from lower socioeconomic status and had no father at home". I went to two schools that had a large percentage of students that would fit the above classification and you know what? They would also fit the reports findings to a tee. And yet, as stated, no texting, no social network sites. Might there be another cause for the findings of the report?

Teens are teens. They explore the boundaries of what is possible. They experiment. That's what teens do, even have to do. That's their purpose in life. Let teens be teens. True, as a parent there has to be a certain measure of control and awareness but there also has to be a certain allowance of freedom. In the end most of them will turn out to become well adjusted members of society if they are given the chance. If there is no or little parental control teens may fly off the hook. It happened in ancient Greece, it happened in medieval England, it happens now. This report in my view grossly over-hypes the blame social technologies have in what is the normal behaviour of certain groups of high school kids.

Paris Hilton, a difficult martyr

Raffaels Angels

Scanning Google news, a headline caught my eye: "Paris Hilton arrested on cocaine possession charges in Las Vegas, police say". And I ask myself: why is this news and why should I care? But it's the weekend and I had an idle moment so I decided, for once, to read a gossip page.

True to form it painted Paris Hilton as a very bad girl. She had 2 drug charges thrown at her before, according to the article. One in South Africa and one in France. The first was dropped because the pot was not hers and in France she was charged because she was "having less than a gram of pot in her purse". Come on, in our local coffee shop that amount of pot is swept off the counter as dust.

You see, what pisses me off is the tone of crucifixion - and I don't care what you think of Paris Hilton - for possession of drugs. "Drugs! Oooooh, scary!" said the drunk as he downed another Bushmills and threw up on the barmaid.

I know that drugs are a problem. The whole infrastructure of drugs, the growing of the raw materials, the manufacture and the distribution, are all part of a system that abuses people. But have any of the people who cry foul over this latest drug arrest ever wondered where their jeans and T-shirts are made? The ones replaced, not because they are worn out but because they are 'out of fashion'? Those clothes are probably made in work houses where women and children work 16 hours a day for a pittance. Does anyone ever wonder how much harm that big car or that massive TV do to human society? Especially when you reckon the entire route, from raw material to the product in your possession. It almost makes Paris Hilton's drug charges look as innocent as freshly fallen snow.

The problem is that Paris Hilton is a prime example of someone who is difficult to defend and easy to begrudge. She's eternally young, extremely rich, I doubt she ever wore a pair of jeans more than once and anything she does is turned into a media event, in many cases by herself. So as a figurehead for the above call for an introspective look at yourself she is rather a poor choice. Pity Mother Theresa was never caught with a pinch of white substance sticking to the olfactory summit. It would have been a much more suitable martyr.

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