According to Becker, rule enforcers have two interests. They must justify
their existence and gain respect. In relation to the first interest, enforcers
tend to state that although they are dealing with the problem, it still exists
and their attention is still required to solve it. The second interest leads to
behaviour in which the rule enforcers have to coerce ‘respect from the peo-
ple’ they deal with (ibid., p. 158). Becker does not explain why rule enforcers
need to justify their existence and gain respect by coercion (ibid.) Becker
himself did not research the police,^3 although as a professional jazz pianist
he did have firsthand knowledge of how the police dealt with crime and vice
in Chicago nightlife (Mu ̈ller, 2014). Because of a lack of contextual infor-
mation (historical and local) on the rule enforcers inOutsiders, which is
contrasted with the thick description in the chapters on jazz musicians and
marijuana users, it is hard to explain the interests of the rule enforcers.
In this paper I am interested in how police officers give meaning to their
work in monitoring coffee shops and the people who sell cannabis.
Although Becker already highlighted that rule enforcers are more prag-
matic than rule creators, he categorized them under the general category of
moral entrepreneurs. The main question is then, in what respect can the
work of the police officers be described as moral entrepreneurship? For
instance, do they speak in moral terms about coffee shops, the people who
work there and their job of monitoring coffee shops? Do they use concepts
like right and wrong, good and bad or similar ethical concepts in relation
to the business of selling cannabis? Can we find traces of a moral crusade
in the way police officers approach coffee shops? Or are they just pragmatic
managers doing their job?
In the last decade a process of criminalization of cannabis has taken
place. In the course of this process cannabis has been related to negative
themes such as addiction, ‘vulnerable youth’ and ‘organized crime’ in the
media. In order to explain the current situation regarding the Dutch canna-
bis policy I will first give an overview of the historical context of cannabis
policies in the Netherlands, and then describe the research methods used in
this study.
THE HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS’
CANNABIS POLICY
4In order to understand the Dutch experiment with cannabis, the concept of
‘gedogen’, which is closely related to the English concept of ‘condoning’, is
142 THADDEUS MU ̈LLER