(08-07-2010, 12:07 AM)kandrathe Wrote: I found another link comparing US drugs vs Netherlands Drugs... Irrelevant, except the chart at the bottom of the page, listing 1.51 / 100,000 as a 1999 to 2001 average. The EU crime statistics in detail (table 2) show up through 2007, with an average of 1.06. To cut it over ten years, yes, I can see that. To cut it in half over ten years is a tougher one to swallow.
Those numbers look fine. In fact, they appear to be identical to the ones used in my edited version above.
They tell pretty much the same story - the murder rate in The Netherlands is somewhere around 1.0 right now. It was around 1.32 in 1998, peaked at 1.5 in 2003, and has been more or less dropping ever since. At no point is there any "cutting in half". At most, it has dropped by a third. I see no reason to doubt these statistics - and even if there were, there is no better reason to doubt the low numbers than the high ones.
Perhaps these last couple years have been anomalously low for The Netherlands, but they've been even lower for Minnesota, which has traditionally seen murder rates more around 2.2, or higher - if you're doubting that a murder rate can halve in that time frame.
-Jester