cannabis – Wis[s]e Words

Your (rolling) papers, please

Published on November 3, 20101 Comment

Amsterdam coffeeshop

With a new rightwing government in power in the Netherlands it was just a question of time before the coffeeshops would be targeted again. Attitudes towards cannabis and coffeeshop culture have been hardening on the right in the past decade or so, at least amongst national politicians and there’s less and less support for continuing the policy of tolerance towards cannabis users. The latest argument in this battle is the nuisance coffee shops supposedly cause, especially those aimed at foreigners.

Normally we do everything to lure visitors to the Netherlands, but as soon as they come here to toke up without risking jail, it’s a nuisance. Sure, there’s no denying that some coffeeshops do annoy their neighbours and the mega popular ones down by the Dutch-Belgian and Dutch-German borders are not places you would like to live next to, but on average coffee shops cause much less disturbance than e.g. pubs routinely do. People who’ve enjoyed slightly too much hash are more likely to fall asleep than cause trouble after all, unlike your average lager lout.

So the government has come up with the brilliant idea to introduce a “wietpas“, a membership scheme for coffeeshops, where you have to get a pass to be able to buy cannabis. Only Dutch people would be able to get such a pass so no filthy foreigners will get their hands on our weed.

You can guess what that would mean for tourism in Amsterdam. One of the few things that makes the city something more than a secondrate Vienna is the ability to score cheap, safe weed and enjoy it without harassement. As the Amsterdam bureau for tourism has calculated (Dutch), of the four and a half million tourists who visit Amsterdam each year, roughly a quarter visits a coffeeshop during their stay. That’s more than a million people, who each stay on average two days and spent around 100 euros — and not just on cannabis either. How many of those will continue to come to Amsterdam if they can’t get their fix anymore?

Dutch mayors call for legalised cannabis

Published on November 26, 2008

Amsterdam coffeeshop

Only a few weeks ago it seemed the Dutch tolerance towards soft drugs would end soon, due to the increasing strength of the puritan movement in Dutch politics. Magic mushrooms are already banned, while the future of the coffeeshop seemed limited, due to cheese paring measures forced on city councils like the rule that no coffeeshop could be located within 500 metres of a school. Try and find a coffeeshop in Amsterdam that doesn’t…

Meanwhile the growing troubles caused by socalled drugs tourists from France, Germany and Belgium in border towns had already led several of those towns to close down their coffee shops altogether. The future therefore seemed bleak for the ordinary cannabis user in the Netherlands, who smokes it recreationally or to relief pains and nausea (for which it works quite well, as I’ve seen myself, better than many conventional pain killers or nausea relievers). Though the system had worked reasonably well for some three decades, making going to the coffee shop almost as normal as going down the local for a quick pint and a half, it had always been a stopgap, an attempt to regulate cannabis trade without legalising it, as that would be difficult to explain abroad. It was introduced as a measure to free police resources for the battle against hard drugs as well as to limit the dangers of cannabis users “graduating” towards harder drugs. As such it worked well, but there never was the intention on the part of the authorities to go any further towards legalisation. It was a policy they were forced into but never were comfortable with.

Tolerance as a policy, even had it had the full support of politicians and police, could never continue forever. The inherent contradictions of the policy, which made it semi-legal to buy and sell cannabis at a retail level, but illegal to sell wholesale, let alone grow it, would see to this. But because we could never make the choice of legalisation without incurring the wrath of France and America, nor end Tolerance altogether the situation did continue. The hobbyists and smalltime growers who had been the base of the cannabis culture in the Netherlands were driven out by organised crime causing huge problems for many city councils.

The way these criminals operate is to go to an impoverished neighbourhood in Rotterdam or Tilburg or someplace simular and get a front man to hire a house from the council or housing society. This is then turned into a full blown industrial cannabis nursery, powered by stolen electricity from the neighbours. They only need to keep the flat on for several months, until harvest time, then disappear and make a huge profit selling their harvest to the coffeeshops. Despite everything the councils do to combat this, there’s little risk for the real criminals themselves: they leave everything to their patsies.

So it’s no wonder that the mayors of some thirty cities, including Amsterdam, last Saturday called for an end to this situation, by regulating the “backdoor of the coffeeshop”. What they want is to legalise the growing of cannabis by putting it under state supervision and allowing coffeeshops to legally buy their supplies from these suppliers. This would end the involvement of organised gangs, regulate the awkward situation the coffeeshops themselves are in now where they’re forced to buy from criminals, not to mention provide amuch needed source of income for local councils. It’s a good idea, but at the moment it still seems unlikely the central government will take the councils on, as the governing parties are largely opposed to legalisation.

No more coffeeshops in 2010?

Published on November 10, 2008

That’s what one criminology professor says in an interview (Dutch). Henk van de Bunt, who last year co-wrote a report on the growing of marijuana in the Netherlands and the growing interest organised crime has in it, says continuing foreing pressure as well as this growing criminalisation of softdrugs that will lead to the end of the Dutch tolerance for it. The problem is that while buying and selling softdrugs is tolerated (not legal, just not actively prosecuted), growing it and selling it wholesale isn’t. And while growing weed once was done by amateur and homegrowers, organised crime has gotten increasingly involved with it. It’s this creeping criminalisation that will be the death of the coffeeshop, according to van de Bunt.

Now there have always been predictions about the end of tolerance as long as this policy has existed, but this time this prediction might be more accurate than usual. In the past decade the Dutch police has become much more aggressive in combatting the growing marijuana, which has driven out the amateurs and hobbyists as they can’t take the risks anymore. Meanwhile political pressure, both on council and national level to limit tolerance has increased as well. A few weeks ago for example two councils near border with Belgium decided to close down all coffeeshops in their cities because of troubles caused by drugs tourism, while the current government has pledged to forbid coffeeshops from opening near schools.

This is all part of an unspoken campaign to end tolerance of softdrugs not be explicitely ending it, but by making it so unworkable that it has to be ended. By going after the homegrowers the police has encouraged the spread of organised crime into the cannabis trade, which makes the case for ending tolerance that much easier. You can’t argue that ending tolerance will drive the trade udnerground if much of it already is in the hands of the mob anyway. The other prong of this campaign is to put more and more “reasonable” restrictions and demands on coffeeshops, to make it harder to open one or keep one open, death by a thousand cuts. To completely end tolerance has not yet been politically viable, but the van de Bunt is right to think it’s not that far off anymore, thanks to this silent campaign.

A better solution would be to legalise softdrugs completely, both retail and wholesale and make the growth of them a state monopoly. Chances of that happening are not so good though…