The Drug Cultures in France and the Netherlands (1960s–1980s): Banning or Regulating the ‘Unacceptable’

Abstract

Western societies at the turning point of the 1960s and 1970s saw a massive and rapid increase of legal and illegal drug consumption, valorised by the counterculture of the period, and disproportionately affecting many youths through disturbing addiction cases. Public drug scenes, that is, gatherings of wandering addicts, with drug transactions and public drug use, appeared in central or peripheral areas of all large Western cities. Drug abuse, including that of cannabis, heroin, LSD, and (later) cocaine and crack and misused legal medicines, was termed an ‘epidemic’ by the media, designated a ‘social plague’ by politicians, and conceptualised by intellectuals as a threat to civilisation. In France, for instance, the writer Jean Cau used the metaphor of a contaminant disease to warn public opinion of the arrival of this terrifying wave in a mainstream magazine in 1970:

Parents, beware! The plague comes to you […] No one knows where it will stop and how deep it will ravage the American nation. Heroin, morphine, cannabis, hallucinogens have established everywhere their hideous reign. From there, the monster jumped in Britain and Sweden. For two years now, he has put some tentacles on France.¹