The Netherlands has a long history of tolerance of drug use. In the seventeenth century, the opium trade played a not insignificant role in ensuring the profitability of Dutch colonies overseas. In later years, the Dutch government enforced a highly profitable monopoly on the production and trade in opium, which ended only with the Japanese invasion of the East Indies during the Second World War. In the early 1900s the authorities opened an official cocaine factory in Amsterdam, which did a roaring trade in drugs for medical use until 1963. I’d heard it claimed that the stunned looks on the
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