A Netherlands cafe with a sign saying “Coffee Shop” may look like a normal place to get a good cup of joe. Inside, however, people are often smoking, and the counter will display a wide variety of cannabis products for sale.
Some tourists come to Holland specifically for such shops, as they are permitted to smoke marijuana without fear of being arrested. A new ruling may change this, as the European Court in Luxembourg stated last week that nonresidents might be denied access to such coffee shops in accordance with European law.
In an attempt to fight public nuisance and the illegal market attributed to drug tourism, the city of Maastricht adopted a local order in 2005 to ban foreigners from access to coffee shops. One closed coffee shop claimed the ban is discriminatory. The Dutch Council of State requested the European Court to rule in this matter, and is expected to proceed in the spring of 2011.
Maastricht Mayor Onno Hoes told The Epoch Times that 14 coffee shops in the center of the city were visited by 1.4 million foreigners in 2008. This was 70 percent of the total visitors.
Hoes said the number of drug tourists is high in border towns such as Maastricht, which is near Belgium and Germany.
The number of visitors is much lower further into the Netherlands, with the exception of Amsterdam with its more than 220 coffee shops. In the town of Eindhoven, only 2 percent of the customers are foreigners, he said.
The “nuisance” caused by the drug tourists can be seen at the town center, where numerous cars are improperly parked. Another is drug dealers.
A side effect of the large number of drug tourists in Maastricht, according to Hoes, is “foreign seekers.” Hoes refers to them as young men from large cities that come to illegally sell soft and hard drugs on the streets.
Senior researcher at the Tilburg University, Nicole Maalsté said the perceived nuisance partly originates from the fact that foreigners who use cannabis mainly belong to a subculture and stand out, whereas in the Netherlands, users that frequent coffee shops belong to all levels of society. Maalsté has researched Dutch drug regulations for 20 years.
Since 2002, police have increasingly taken large-scale action against professional cannabis growers. Maalsté said, “They are the largest actions taken against cannabis cultivators in the world.”
Although the coffee shops seem to attract an illegal market and create public disturbance, according to Maalsté, things are a bit more complicated. She said the main cause is Dutch regulations that were never followed through.
According to Maalsté, since the ’60s and ’70s, in the time of the Beatles and free love, the Netherlands already had a large stream of foreigners visiting popular festivals. During the festivals, large groups of people used imported cannabis, and police could not cope with the situation and held discussions on whether it was worthwhile to prosecute the cannabis users.
