Say it aint so? The Dutch cabinet wants to discourage foreigners from coming to the Netherlands to buy drugs by limiting the amounts permitted to be sold and by only allowing debit card payment. Please tell me this is just for the border towns for the purpose of slowing down the trade in areas bordering Belgium and Germany and close to France and Luxembourg?
The consumption and possession of small amounts of cannabis has been decriminalised since 1976 in the Netherlands, where it is sold in about 700 licensed coffee shops. However, the mayors of Roosendaal and Bergen-op-Zoom, some 15 kilometres apart, announced that all eight coffee shops within their borders would be barred from selling cannabis as of yesterday.
The new law has forced some 25,000 marijuana-smoking tourists, mainly French and Belgian, who flood their communities every week, to take their money elsewhere, or ride the trains further into Holland to stock-up.
Some Results of the Dutch Drug Policy
In the Netherlands 9.7% of young adults (aged 15-24) consume soft drugs once a month, comparable to the level in Italy (10.9%) and Germany (9.9%) and less than in the UK (15.8%) and Spain (16.4%) but much higher than in, for example, Sweden (3%), Finland or Greece. Dutch rates of drug use are lower than U.S. rates in every category. So, amazing as it may seem, people will travel to the Netherlands to score weed, even though there's a higher percentage of users in their own countries. However, maybe the tide is turning on the whole phenomena? And the Dam is about to burst because of the rise in criminal investigations into organized crime, which mainly involve drugs (72%). Most of these are investigations of hard drug crime (specifically cocaine and synthetic drugs). What a shame it would be, if synthetic and hard-drugs ruined the party. My hope is that the good people of Holland will, once again, let wisdom prevail.
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