New Year's Eve
in Amsterdam was even more festive than usual this season as thousands
of European visitors flocked to the city to enjoy what they believed
would be the last night they'd be welcome in the coffee shops of the
Netherlands.
For several months, the reigning Dutch
government had been trumpeting the imminent demise of the old coffee
shop regime as of Jan. 1, 2012, and the mainstream media were only too
eager to amplify the message.
Under the mandated new rules, all
existing Dutch coffee shops would be converted to members-only clubs
strictly limited to the patronage of Dutch citizens and registered
expatriates, and the dreaded "drug tourists" from all over the world
would be barred from entry.
But after the border city of Maastricht
and other municipalities in Holland demanded that the government delay
its plans for at least a year, Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten announced
in November that the system won't be introduced nationwide until 2013.
At the same time, Opstelten insisted that
cannabis cafés in three towns in the south of the country —
Noord-Brabant, Limburg and Zeeland — will have to turn themselves into
members-only clubs by May 1 of this year as a sort of pilot program for
the new policy.
Coffee shop owners in Maastrict have
already banned all but Dutch, German and Belgian nationals from buying
cannabis products in an effort to appease the government, and the border
towns of Bergen op Zoom and Roosendaal have gotten rid of their coffee
shops altogether.
Elsewhere in the Netherlands, 16 coffee
shops In Rotterdam have been shut down because they were located within
250 meters of schools. If this proscription were applied across the
country, another 94 coffee shops would have to close. To make things
even worse, the government wants to extend the distance-from-school rule
from 250 to 350 meters, which will shut down even more coffee shops.
This whole mess started in 2006 when the
city of Maastricht decided to ban tourists from the local coffee shops
and a coffee shop owner was forced to close after two non-Dutch
nationals were found on his premises.
In upholding the legality of the city's
action, The Netherlands' highest court, the Council of State, appealed
to the high European court — sort of the EU equivalent of the U.S.
Supreme Court — to issue a ruling that the Maastricht ban does not
conflict with EU laws.
Last July, EU Advocate General Yves Bot
said the Netherlands was within its rights to ban tourists from coffee
shops. Bot said he considers the move necessary to "protect public
order" and "reduce the nuisance caused by drug tourism." In addition,
Bot said, the ban would contribute to European efforts to combat the
illegal drug trade.
In Amsterdam, the City Council opposes
the introduction of the membership scheme. "We are concerned about the
problems that will arise from large-scale street dealing," one
councilman said, adding that "there are also health concerns, because
with street dealing we cannot monitor the quality of the soft drugs or
the age of the buyers."
The city had solved these problems in the
early 1970s when it decriminalized recreational drug use and allowed
the establishment of coffee shops as places where cannabis products
could be sold and consumed in-house.
But the Dutch policy of tolerance has
never been at all popular with most other European governments nor the
draconian American authorities, and the social truce that has allowed
over-the-counter cannabis commerce in Holland to flourish has always
been an uneasy one.
The recent demonstration of official
opposition to the coffee shop culture has been a long time coming, but
now it looms large on the immediate societal horizon. The Christian
Democratic party (CDA) that ruled in the 1990s and early 2000s and
remains part of the current government has never fully accepted the
"gray area" philosophy, and now that its coalition partners comprise the
Liberals and the anti-Islam party led by Geert Wilders, the CDA is
making its move with unprecedented confidence.
The intensified crackdown on the coffee
shop culture seems to have been enabled by the findings of a government
commission in 2009 that concluded hashish and marijuana are far more
powerful now than when the "gray area" policy was introduced in the
1970s. (This increase in potency, of course, is the result of the rapid
development of the Dutch growing community and its wizardry in
generating new and ever more effective strains of marijuana.)
At the same time, according to the
authorities, the bigger the coffee shop industry becomes, the more
likely it is to come into the grasp of "organized crime." To that end,
the commission recommended cafés become smaller and should sell only to
locals.
The illegal growing industry is thought
to be worth some $2.6 billion a year, involving some 40,000 people in
marijuana cultivation operations on what they call plantations, of which
some 5,000 are busted each year. The Dutch government now intends to
increase its efforts to drive "organized crime" out of the production
and trade of marijuana and to seize the assets of convicted drug
criminals.
The crazy thing is that, with marijuana
cultivation and distribution remaining illegal, persons engaged in these
activities are organized criminals by definition. If they really want
to get "organized crime" out of the cannabis business, they would simply
legalize marijuana completely and all that crime would just go away
since it wouldn't be "criminal activity" any longer.
The war against marijuana users and the
cannabis culture is particularly absurd because there's no social harm
that's ever been proved to result from viping beyond the possible
inducements to race-mixing and guilt-free sexual activity that are
proscribed by the orthodox religious order.
Here in Holland, the long-term tolerance
of the cannabis culture has both created an atmosphere that attracts
weed-smoking pilgrims to make up a significant portion of the local
tourist economy and fostered a full-scale cannabis industry that
generates billions of euros worth of business within the intimate
confines of this tiny nation.
Accordingly, every knowledgeable person I
have consulted about the issue continues to scoff at the notion that
the state can transform the coffee shop culture by means of the pending
legislation.
My friend and mentor Michael Veling,
proprietor of the 420 Café and a life-long cannabis activist in
Amsterdam, remains convinced that the year-long moratorium now in effect
will no doubt end in a further extension of the truce rather than a
victory for the suppressive forces.
"There is no way they are going to be
able to demonstrate in the courts that 'drug tourism' constitutes a
'public nuisance' or a 'threat to public order,'" Veling told me, adding
that Justice Minister Opstelten, a Liberal Party member, will have to
report back to the CDA representatives — who started this shit thinking
they could finally win the battle — that he tried everything but it
proved impossible to enforce their mandate and things will have to
continue as before.
At any rate, Veling stressed, would-be
drug tourists from America and elsewhere will definitely be welcome in
the coffee shops of Holland for at least the entire present year. C'mon
over, he said, we appreciate your business.
—Amsterdam
Jan. 26-27, 2012
Posts
