Tolerance != acceptance

Paper finished and turned in! I ended up writing more than I wanted to (I spent half of the paper writing about the working definitions of the terminology before actually writing about anything meaningful) but at least it is finished. Lecture was really interesting, too, about Dutch drug policy. It wasn't anything that I didn't know already because I read about things and do research in advance, but my professor brought up an interesting question - why should drugs be illegal? She asked it within the context of our home governments and I really couldn't think of an answer. We are told from a young age that "Drugs are bad" and fed exaggerations that do more harm than good about the effects of drug use. In the course, we finally came up with the fact that drugs are illegal in more place because of cultural norms in western culture - alcohol is condoned by the church (the old water to wine bit), but generally speaking, drugs just have no place within cultural makeup of most western societies. And it is not so much different here than at home. While use of soft drugs is tolerated, it is certainly not encouraged, and the basis of the toleration comes from a pragmatic sensibility, to protect the individual and therefore protect society as a whole. By tolerating soft drug use, it removes soft drugs from the same market as hard drugs, from the same category. It is a policy that I understand as logical and I think it is even more important for foreigners to understand that tolerance, at least in the Netherlands, is not at all akin to acceptance.

Nick and Sofia are back in the Netherlands for the day and I plan on heading into Amsterdam in a little bit to meet them for lunch. Then this weekend will hopefully be used to catch up with some of the work that I haven't done yet. And I also want to finish making my lists this weekend. I am trying to come to at least a working decision about grad school and it is harder than I thought it would be. I have two options and so I have spent a fair bit of time comparing them, attempting to look at them objectively... I just don't know yet. Though I think I'm getting closer to a definitive decision.

-B

P.S. and just for fun...