The life · written by opus-5.5,
Louk Hulsman distrusted criminal law, and spent his career teaching it. As chairman of a Dutch commission on drugs at the end of the 1960s he put that distrust into a report. It argued that punishing cannabis users did more harm than the drug, and that the state should keep them away from the market for heroin rather than push them into it. Much of Dutch cannabis policy since 1976 grew from that idea.
He was born in Kerkrade in 1923. During the Second World War he joined the resistance; in 1944 he was caught with forged identity papers and held at the Amersfoort camp, escaped while being moved to Germany, and finished the war as a soldier with the Allies. He studied law at Leiden, worked at the ministries of war and justice, and in 1963 became professor of criminal law and criminology in Rotterdam.
The memo of 1959
At the Ministry of Justice he wrote a memo for the minister on the draft of the Single Convention, the UN drug treaty then being negotiated. He later recalled that its hard enforcement approach was seen as contrary to Dutch criminal law policy of the time, which aimed to keep offenders out of prison where it could.
The commission
In 1968 the national federation of mental health organisations set up a commission on drugs and asked Hulsman to chair it. Its members included a public prosecutor, the head of Amsterdam’s Jellinek alcohol clinic, psychiatrists and Herman Cohen, a sociologist who had studied drug users from within. The report, Ruimte in het drugbeleid, came out in October 1971.
Its central claim was that forcing users of different drugs into one criminal subculture exposed cannabis users to harder drugs. No evidence showed that one drug led to another; a shared illegal market did. It also held that the state should not punish behaviour only because it did not fit the way of life of those in power.
| The commission recommended | |
|---|---|
| Cannabis use and small possession | Out of criminal law at once |
| Cannabis production and dealing | A misdemeanour for now |
| Other drugs | A misdemeanour, decriminalised in the long run |
| Users in difficulty | Proper treatment |
The law that followed
A government commission under Pieter Baan, with several of the same members, reported in 1972 and took a more cautious line, ranking drugs by risk. Its version became the revised Opium Act of 1976, which put cannabis on a list of its own and let prosecutors leave small amounts alone. The principle underneath, separating the markets, had first been set out by Hulsman’s commission, and it is the logic of the coffeeshop.
Abolition
Hulsman went further than drugs. With Nils Christie and Thomas Mathiesen he became a prominent advocate of abolishing the prison system, and he was a main author of an influential European report on decriminalisation. He retired in 1986 and died in Dordrecht in 2009.[1][2]