‘Pill? Line?’ Actually, every student in Groningen has had to make a choice at some point: should I do it or not?
Drug use is quite normal for Groningen students. And so it can happen that a young girl among dozens of students and teachers talks openly about that one time when she went bad. Five or six ecstasy pills were too much. “I was out for four hours.”
High Hanseatic League
It’s Tuesday afternoon. ‘High Hanze’ is going on in the central hall of the Hanzehogeshool on the Zerniketerrein. Presenter Emma Wortelboer (known from the TV show Squirt and Swallow ) talk to students about drugs. Students of the Social Legal Services program organized the day.
Necessary, they think. Drugs are everywhere in student life and it’s best to talk about them openly. That also happens. A boy, wearing a blue and white striped shirt, easily talks about his substance use. Things got a bit out of hand during the corona period. “I looked at myself and thought: what am I doing?”
Numbers
But don’t think that every student takes pills every week. Eric Blaauw works at Hanze University of Applied Sciences and has researched it. “One in two students has ever used drugs, one in three had done so in the past year.” That may sound like a lot, “but it also means that most do not use regularly.”
Well, not everyone does. But meanwhile, the city council is concerned. Groningers buy around 50,000 euros worth of coke every day. Moreover, our sewage water is full of coke residues. Only in Amsterdam is sniffing more common. Groningen is also blow champion of the Netherlands. Nowhere did the researchers find so many traces of cannabis in the sewers as in Groningen.
Taboo is gone
Blaauw is also allowed to take the stage. And he has also smoked weed sometimes, he confesses to Wortelboer. “Only, my parents never knew.”
And that is different today. The taboo on drug use has disappeared, the students see. A pinch or a pill is becoming part of the nightlife. “It is the most normal thing in the world,” says a blonde girl wearing a pink panther print.