As a 20-year-old student from the Netherlands who just experienced her first 4 weeks in New York City, I was surprised to hear that rates of drug use are as high as they were when Nixon declared the war on drugs in 1971. The use of marijuana among students appears to be very high too. Naively, I had always thought that my country, with its liberal laws, was the only one in which this was the case. I was wrong.

“I am a student from Amsterdam, and no, I have never smoked weed before,” was the introduction I expected I’d have to give to the many new people I would meet here. Shamefully, I would confess to fellow classmates that I was from a city that had a legal weed selling “coffee shop” on virtually every corner of the street, but I’d never smoked a joint. What kind of Dutch student from Amsterdam never at least tried to toke?

I know the smell of pot very well. It was hard to miss when I lived in a student dormitory in Amsterdam. In a way, it made me feel at home. To my surprise, I experienced that exact homely feeling when I first arrived at my apartment in Crown Heights where I would be staying during my exchange program with Lang. I was overwhelmed with that sweet, particular scent, which I did not detest like I do with cigarette smoke. My expectations clearly did not match reality. No one brought up the topic of dope after I mentioned that I come from Amsterdam, and I found myself surrounded by the smell of weed much more often than I had naively thought I would.

Not smoking pot was never a conscious decision and I didn’t have principal objections against smoking weed. As science shows, alcohol does more harm to people, yet I have been enjoying beers at parties and wine over dinners for years (legally in the Netherlands from age 18, as opposed to here in the U.S.). Also, I know there are also many medical advantages of the drug.

Finding weed was never the problem. I was in enough situations where I had the chance to just do it. My boyfriend even grew his own plant, but somehow, it never appealed to me. Maybe it was the legendary story that ran through my family about one of my uncles traumatized me. He tried it once, and his mind went crazy, scaring him to death, after which he swore to never do it again. But maybe that was a bad trip or something.

Or maybe I’m just a control freak who is scared to lose it when getting high. I just don’t like that it is so normal to use drugs in the Netherlands, even for people who were really young.

My sister once came home from a school excursion telling me that some 13-year-old boys from her class had smoked joints and one of them threw up in the bus. It sounded gross and stupid to me. According to the Dutch government, almost 10 percent of children between age 12 to 16 has used cannabis at least once, and this number grows to over 30 percent for college students.   

The stereotypes in my head about my own country, my expectations of how people viewed the city I live in, and what I experienced since I arrived in New York have made me more conscious about drugs. I had taken the Dutch policy on soft drugs for granted, but moving to a different country makes you aware of where you come from.

I came to the U.S. fearing that people would see the Netherlands as this liberal country where everyone smoked weed. I put this pressure on myself, that the fact that I did not conform to this “standard” was somehow wrong. I even considered getting high before I left for New York. Luckily, I did not.

My first month studying in Manhattan and living in Brooklyn has been enlightening and taught me that drug use is prevalent here too, with almost 5 percent of college students being daily users of marijuana, let alone the occasional smokers. It is not an “Amsterdam thing”. I’ve been liberated from the ideas I had about the stereotypes of my own country, and the pressure to adhere to them. After all, I didn’t walk around in clogs either.

Illo by Natasha Dewitz