Amsterdam, 2017

These days, arriving at Amsterdam's Central Station, many tourists will be overwhelmed by the distinctly sweet, herbal scent of marijuana or hash. Since the late 1960s and the Flower Power days, Amsterdam has been known the world over for its Red Light District and hash bars or coffee shops, where patrons can ‘legally’ purchase marijuana and hash in small amounts. In the last forty years, the city has become known as a modern-day ‘Sodom and Gomorra’ for its toleration of prostitution and use of cannabis. In Quentin Tarantino's Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction (1994), one of the many eclectic dialogues between mobsters John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson captures Amsterdam's liberal drug policy in a nutshell.

Otto Copes, 1629

More than twenty years since Pulp Fiction was released, a growing number of states in the United States are legalizing the use of cannabis. No doubt, Amsterdam and the Netherlands’ liberal policy on drug use have played some role in this development. In the Netherlands, toleration of the use of drugs and other vices, including legalized prostitution, has a longer history; a history that is embedded in the way in which Dutch municipal authorities, schoolteachers, moralists, and parents raised their adolescent children in the Golden Age, in the heyday of abundance and affluence, an era when moderation was a necessity, not an option.