How to save millions of lives and make billions of dollars: Do like the Dutch who make £300 million a year taxing drugs instead of fighting them

Well, I’ve said it many times before: If all the countries of the world would simply legalise all drugs, it would end a lot of the world’s problems with crime and terrorism. By cutting out the ‘middle man’, which in this case is organised crime, you would rid the world of one of its most dangerous cancers.

Not only that, of course, for it would actually make a Hell of a lot of money too, in taxes, for governments around the world. Instead of losing more and more money and lives fighting this doomed War on Drugs, we could save millions of lives and make millions of easy tax dollars as well.

As the following story about my own home country shows:

Cannabis nets the Dutch treasury more than £300 million a year and has become one of the country’s top cash crops, new figures show. Turnover of the legal ‘coffee shop’ trade in the Netherlands is estimated to be at least £1.6 billion every year “Coffee shops”, where small amounts of cannabis have been legally bought and smoked since 1972, have become a major industry and a popular tourist attraction in cities such as Amsterdam.

Tax on the 265,000kg of soft drugs sold last year in the 730 cafés netted the government £315 million. The true figure may be much higher. “They do not want to know about it in The Hague, as it is all much too politically sensitive,” one anonymous tax inspector told an investigation for the Dutch KRO television channel broadcast last night. Turnover of the legal “coffee shop” trade is estimated to be at least £1.6 billion every year.