I would love to see marijuana legalized personally: It's far less harmful than alcohol (which is legal), and there's medical use for it.
Legalizing marijuana would bring BILLIONS in revenue--effecting reducing the debt!
But what would the police do if they couldn't bust people for having a bag of pot?
Seriously - their workload would be down 50%, and the media wouldn't be filled with all these stories about how they're doing a "good job."
Holland's in for a catastrophe. This is a clear-cut example of a small clique in national politics completely misunderstanding the problems a number of municipalities in border regions are suffering. The fact is that there are two major problems with semi-legal marijuana sales in Holland.
Number one, the 'coffee shops', which are the more or less legal stores that sell marijuana have the right to sell marijuana, but not to buy it. Anyone else has neither the right to grow or sell it or buy it from anywhere other than a coffee shop. This means organized crime still controls production, and part of the money made by the legal businesses flows there because these have no legal alternative.
Number two, drug tourism. Some border regions suffer varying degrees of inconvenience from Belgian, French and German traffic crossing the border solely to go to coffee shops. However, most local governments have long since fixed this for themselves. In my own city, near the Belgian border, for instance, even the two conservative parties whose national wings want to restrict drug sales oppose this, because through strategic positioning and regulating the coffee shops, they have almost completely removed the adverse effects to the population. The south of Limburg, which is the extreme south-eastern part of the Netherlands, is a bulge protruding into Belgium and Germany, as it were. It is extremely convenient to access from Germany, Belgium, France and Luxemburg, and as a result, they have a larger amount of drug tourism-related traffic. This causes congestion, not in the least place because the coffee shops are mostly found near the heart of cities there.
So, this ban on foreign customers is only desired by the population of Limburg (who, by a freak coincidence in the elections for parliament have a disproportionally large number of representatives and members of the government) and some regions in Brabant (to the west of Limburg). However, it is also harmful to the Dutch economy. It is expected to dramatically cut tourism to Amsterdam, for instance. Also, throughout the country, many millions if not billions of euros annually are going to be lost from indirect effects of drug tourism: people who go to Holland for dope usually spend money on food, lodgings, and other tourist activities.
The worst part is, that this has no chance of even denting demand, which means that criminal street-sellers are going to return in vast numbers, who are not going to be nearly as scrupulous as the coffee shops in not selling hard drugs or polluted marijuana.
Exactly the kind of response I was hoping for - thanks.
I could call the deceasing tourism income a mile away, but we'll see how bad it gets otherwise.
In Canada, like I said above, pot will never be legal because the police would have little else to do most of the time. Coffee houses keep the dealers away from the public and overall results in less crime. But we all know by now that law officials are more interested in their own image than the safety of the public.
Any mention of pot and Canada deserves a reprise of this. Perhaps it's only funny if you grew up in the 70's when the tourism and business development ditty 'A Place to Grow' was played every 17 seconds and perpetually on the joyful lips of Ontario school children everywhere. Canada's John Stewart turned it into this after a huge bust of a grow op in an old beer factory (I know eh! All they were missing was a pizza oven) in 2003. If so, I apologize, but it's still makes me giggle. :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOYdBWIQW0I
Also of some, likely fleeting, relevance: http://news.sympatico.ca/oped/coffee-talk/canadas_pot_laws_go_up_in_smoke/da2c93d8
Another theory was brought to my attention:
A lot of the coffee shop clientele are Americans who are bringing crime to Holland, and this may be the country's way of getting these people out.
Yay / nay ?
Sir GH wrote: Another theory was brought to my attention:
A lot of the coffee shop clientele are Americans who are bringing crime to Holland, and this may be the country's way of getting these people out.
Yay / nay ?
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What's all the fuss about Holland anyway? They haven't been of interest to anyone since George Best nutmegged Johan Cruyf in 1978. The crazy Flemish are much more interesting, and they have nicer beer.