In response to Kaitlyn Andrews-Rice's column ("Amsterdam doesn't put much stock in morality, lets its citizens live," April 2):

I am a former Penn State student who is currently writing my senior thesis on Dutch sociology. I am currently living and working in Amsterdam (and never plan to go back to America), and I would like to elaborate on the column on Amsterdam and clarify some of the misinformed views. It's a sad fact that the greatest city in the world is stigmatized with the shallow view of being just sex and drugs. The crude reality is that any city in America has prostitutes and drugs. Look up "escorts" in the phonebook and in a half-hour you can have a woman at your door.

What all the tourists and Penn Staters studying abroad miss out on is the beauty of the government in the Netherlands and how it has shaped the society and the culture. The Netherlands was one of the first nations to recognize gay marriage and has a leader who is openly gay. Meanwhile, back in the United States, President Bush is trying to pass a constitutional amendment to make it illegal. The society is an eclectic mix of expats and different cultures. Racism and sexism are unheard of. The government realizes the hypocrisies and absurdities of other nations' laws like the United States' (tobacco is legal yet marijuana isn't; gambling is legal in Las Vegas but not anywhere else), as well as the hundreds of billions of dollars every year it takes to fund the programs to enforce the laws and penalize the "criminals." Instead, the Dutch have made certain things (soft drugs, gambling, prostitution and the drinking age is 16) legal, and the tax revenue as a result is able to fund things like free healthcare, subsidized housing and rehabilitation programs, to name a few.

So is everybody in Amsterdam smoking pot, knocking up hookers, and shrooming every day? No. The majority who do are the tourists.

There's a word that we use in Amsterdam -- gezellig -- and it describes our great lifestyle here. It has no direct English translation, and it's probably because the people, who live here and appreciate a society with consistent rules and a government that doesn't try and control the masses, know the feeling of being gezellig.