Dutch Students and Weed

The latest study:

For decades, marijuana use and sale had been legal in the Netherlands and could even be purchased at coffee shops and cannabis shops around the region, which led to a massive increase in drug tourism — people coming to the Netherlands with the intention to purchase or use pot. In time, the city of Maastricht saw its crime rate triple compared with that of cities further from the border. To curb the drug tourism problem (mostly coming from, as the study authors write, “bad tourists” from France and Luxembourg), cannabis shop owners in 2011 issued a “partial prohibition” policy change, which only allowed people from specific nationalities to buy cannabis on their premises. Interested customers had to present a valid Dutch, German, or Belgian ID to be granted entry to a cannabis shop.

This policy created a unique situation, the study authors write, where students at the university could be separated into groups — those that could legally obtain marijuana and those that could not — and their academic performance could be measured. They concluded that students who could no longer legally buy cannabis increased their grades substantially — particularly in classes that required more math or numerical knowledge.

I can think of many problems with this study, the first of which is that foreign students in the Netherlands may well be particularly interested in legal weed, so they may not be the best group on which to perform such a study. But my general impression of my children's generation is that marijuana is considered among them the drug of slackers, avoided by kids with any ambition.