According to The Brisbane Times, Holland is fed up with drug-related tourism. Moves are afoot to restrict dope and hash-peddling coffee shops to domestic clientele. You can understand the local’s frustration, what with non-Dutch automobiles clogging their roads in their occupants’ efforts to spend billions of Euros in-country.
Roosendaal and Bergen-op-Zoom, two other southern border councils, announced last year that their eight coffee shops would be interdicted from selling cannabis from next Wednesday in a bid to push back some 25,000 drug tourists per week.
This should make an end, the mayors explained, to the long lines of foreign cars on their roads, hundreds of youths hovering outside coffee shops on weekends, and illegal drug dealers attracted by their presence.
Damn hippies and their non-Dutch cars! Can’t think of a Dutch car…
Quick search found they have one manufacturing company owned mostly by Mitsubishi:
“Currently NedCar produces one vehicle, the Mitsubishi Colt, which has been built since 2004.”
Damn hippies in their non-Colts!
The article doesn’t detail if the coffee hash houses adversely affect other businesses, but seems a bad time to crack the whip during an economic slowdown.
Maybe if the tourists would just bicycle in . . . .
This is more a failure of zoning and traffic engineering.
From an economic perspective it makes as much sense as Nevada moving to outlaw gambling.
Wow… tourist flooding in to spend money. What a nice problem to have.
RedStapler – I was thinking the same thing. With the strong euro vs the dollar and certain US cities all but fully legalizing marijuana (Oakland, CA in particular) Amsterdam could lose some business permanently if they go through with this.
I worked and lived in Amsterdam for two years in the late 1990’s and had a great time (from what little I remember). No need to drive anywhere in The Netherlands — an excellent public transportation system. Guess I’ll have to go to Vancouver for my sex and drugs fix for now on.
Why are we getting this news of the Netherlands from a paper that’s on the other side of the globe, in a backwater city of a backwater country? (I love Australia, don’t get me wrong.) It seems this story is pretty tangential to cars, as well, but I looked!
Impossible! Everyone knows that Europeans take mass transit everywhere…
(Every European I ever talk to always giggles when I mention that to them :)
@ David Holzman
Brisbane people are fascinated by drugs and drug use.
…. a backwater city of a backwater country? (I love Australia, don’t get me wrong.)
No-one takes it personally down here. We laugh at ourselves much better than most.
As much as I love the Dutch, they are going to regret this policy. The Dutch will realise how much money Cannabis brings into the country and when that dries up, they’ll have a major deficit to fix.
Tourists can still cruise for prostitutes, right? Right??
This is only about the border towns, not Amsterdam. My head office is in Amsterdam and half the people who live there aren’t native Dutch.
The car thing is a clue.
If you corner the market on recreational (and might I add, legal) drug use, DON’T GIVE IT UP!!! Last I checked, the economy wasn’t doing so well, here and overseas. What would this mean for the local convenience stores when their weekend customers no longer get the munchies? This could spell disaster for local snack food producers!
Pista,
As far as I know, prostitutes are still a Go. For now.
I can assure everybody here that at the weekends, the biggest flow of traffic by far is SOUTH, as Dutch people go to find restauraunts serving excellent food in Belgium. Antwerp on a Saturday night is clogged up with, err, “Cloggies”. Great cuisine massively outsells nasty weed.
Pista – you do know that prostitution is the number one front for people trafficking, right? What was the old word for that – oh yeah, “slavery”. It ain’t funny.
I guess it is a border problem. There doesn’t seem to be any such problems in Amsterdam. The no-smoking (tobacco) laws have pushed bar patrons out to the sidewalk, however, creating a bigger nuisance than the coffeshops.
Hash and other cannabis products are not legal in the Netherlands (which doesn’t mean that they are illegal just something in a netherworld of neither legal or illegal) and as a non-legal product they are not taxed. So as a non taxed product they get the government treatment of any untaxed product or service and that is please go away.
About prostitution: There are movements to rain that in to.
About Holland: Could you use the word the Netherlands instead of Holland as Holland is only (the most important) part of the Netherlands and this plays outside Holland.
About carmakers in the Netherlands: Around WWI there was Spijker/Spyker that went bust. After WWII there was Daf which sold its car division to Volvo cars in the 70’s. In the 90’s Volvo sold that factory to Mitsubischi and Mercedes for the four seater smart.
The thing about the coffee shops is, you gotta remember that, like, the tourists…and…the weed is…like…
…wait, what?