Word: heroines
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Many foreign visitors are shocked by the Netherlands' wide-open drug scene. Heroin is still overtly sold on some streets, despite increased police vigilance, while soft drugs such as marijuana and hashish are readily available at coffee shops. Waiters bring the fixings right to the table. An enterprising service called Home Blow Couriers even offers free delivery of drug orders in excess of $12.50. Small wonder that youthful "hash tourists," especially from West Germany, flock to Amsterdam's Dam Square, or that visitors who do not understand Dutch occasionally experience strange feelings from the marijuana pastries they unknowingly...
Hard drugs are illegal, but only dealers are liable for prosecution; users are not arrested unless they commit other crimes. The Dutch are still experimenting with how to handle their 16,000 heroin addicts, a number that is significantly higher in proportion to the population than the estimated addicts in West Germany, Britain and France. In the late '70s, Amsterdam licensed four cafes to distribute heroin to addicts. The result was a spurt in drug-related crime and 30 heroin-overdose deaths a year. The city scrapped the scheme in 1980. Today, whenever a junkie is arrested for robbery...
...choices made by the next two Wolf daughters have been even more tragic. Loretta, 23, has never held on to a job and depends on welfare to support her four-year-old son. According to her family, she has a heroin habit, was arrested for possession and distribution, and is awaiting trial. Her sister Lovette, nicknamed "Betsy," was also a drug abuser; she lived a short life in the fast lane. Betsy had her first child at 16 and a second by a different father at 19. She wore the hippest threads, went to the trendiest places, and consumed drugs...
...Roosevelt Hospital Center, calls for more radical interventions. "If we want to stem the tide of this epidemic," he says, "we have to open more methadone-treatment slots. I'd suggest that we go to Needle Park and give away methadone and syringes rather than letting the dealers sell heroin." Currently, there are only 30,000 methadone slots for the city's 200,000 or more IV addicts. Last week New York Governor Mario Cuomo announced that the state would be expanding the number of openings...
...despair. Drug addicts are tough subjects for reform. "We need to stop the recruitment of young people into IV drug use in the first place," says Don Des Jarlais, of the New York State division of substance abuse services. Working with youths who are sniffing but not yet injecting heroin, Des Jarlais says, "We get them thinking about AIDS and what to do to prevent themselves from becoming exposed...