So if you ban something, it just goes away, right?

Tourist cannabis cafe ban leads to surge in dealing in the south

The government’s decision to turn the cafes into members’ only clubs in the southern provinces last May led to a sharp rise in street dealing, the paper says. It bases its claim on police and city council figures.

In Maastricht, at the forefront of efforts to reduce drugs tourism, the number of drugs crimes has doubled over the past year while in Roermond they are up three-fold with at least 60 active street dealers, the AD says.

Gee, who could have guessed that would happen?

Generally saner heads prevail…

Officials in Amsterdam and many other towns have already said they will not implement the ban on tourists and will instead take advantage of the legal provision for a ‘tailor-made’ approach to the marijuana trade.

The question has never been about whether people will buy and sell cannabis. The question is only who will be doing it and where. If you care at all about the second question, then you really have no choice but to be in favor of legalization.

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15 Responses to So if you ban something, it just goes away, right?

  1. Servetus says:

    Amazing how the Dutch knew what would happen if they closed the cafes, and they did it anyway. Everyone warned them.

    I even used my urban living experiences here in the states to blog them and inform the Dutch that once they closed the cafes, if they wanted a good night’s sleep, they should use wax earplugs instead of the foam variety. Wax earplugs are far superior to foam for muting the nightly sounds of gunfire between rival criminal gangs.

  2. claygooding says:

    First they had to feel the loss of tourist dollars but not from the pot industry,,it was the other business owners hurt the most,, restaurants next door to coffee houses being my first guess followed closely by the pimps.

  3. Duncan20903 says:

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    Well did it at least keep those steeenky Frenchmen from urinating in the bushes? Did it reduce the number of Germans that honk their car horns on Holland’s high ways? Those were the two main complaints when the policy was bring discussed.

  4. ezrydn says:

    “Shooting one’s self in the foot” seems to have become the new government pastime.

    • War Vet says:

      “Shooting one’s self in the foot” . . . at least they’re accurate that close. Now with more drug crime, they’ll have to scan their sectors and then shoot foot again . . . let’s hope they’ll change this policy.

  5. Awaiting/moderation says:

    You just wouldn’t believe what the real reasons behind this ridiculous policy are, but just in case you would:

    Also in the Netherlands evidence has been mounting since the late 1990s that important individuals are involved in child abuse networks. ISGP already did a brief article on reports in Belgian dossiers that concerned the Netherlands. But there is more.

    In the late 1990s there was the socalled Rolodex investigation in the Netherlands. A 2004 letter of Hans Laroes, editor in chief of the NOS News (one of the most respected news programs in the Netherlands), to the Council for Journalism, gives a good background.

    “Already in 2000 top public official Joris Demmink attracted the attention of the research office of the [NOS] News. In march that year we did an investigation with the question if the Belgian Marc Dutroux Affair had tentacles in the Netherlands. It was the time that the Zandvoort child porn case had relit and the media was laying in front of the door of the Belgian Morkhoven workgroup. The name Joris Demmink had been given to me in conversations with detectives. These spoke about a 1998 investigation, ran from a very secret location in Utrecht: an investigation into a network of top public officials, two district attorneys [19 in total at the time in the Netherlands], a former minister, a former attorney of the Queen and a single professor who would have sex with underaged boys. The investigation had begun at the direction of the College of Prosecuter-Generals – instigated by the district attorney of Amsterdam, Vrakking.”

    “Demmink played an important role in that investigation. Detectives had suspected that this top public official had given information to one of the main suspects, the Amsterdam professor Van R., with whom he was friends. Because of that, the professor avoided prosecution, the detectives stated.”

    institute-for-the-study-globalization-and-covert-politics

    Think blackmail, think evedence gathered by American secret services. Now kindly google: “demmink mentioned in congress”

    • Awaiting/moderation says:

      Correction: “evidence”

      Members of the Dutch National press are generally avoiding the city of Maastricht, here’s why:

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bjHkRfBXDs

      The fun starts at the 5 minute mark.

      • Jean Valjean says:

        A classic, textbook example of how and why prohibition cannot work. They can’t get it any clearer than that.

        • Jean Valjean says:

          would be good to have subtitles

        • Nanacyclo/Tetramantony says:

          I speak fluent Dutch, but it would of course be too much work to give you a minute by minute commentary. But here are the main points:

          * The coffee shop owner (bald guy with the various shades of grey lumberjack shirt) is Marc Josemans. He is also the chairman of Maastricht’s Coffeeshops Association and a member of the Taskforce Handhaving Cannabis (Task Force for the Regulation of Cannabis/THC), which produced a report last year detailing how a legal supply line would work.

          * It was Mark’s idea to open all the coffee shops in Maastricht to foreigners, starting a week ago on May 5th (Dutch WW11 Liberation Day)

          * Most, if not all, of the street dealers are very aggressive, armed, & dangerous North Africans (mostly Moroccans) who have flooded in from many other Dutch cities, all of which do not ban foreigners from coffee shops, and, therefore, have no work for street dealers.

          * The guy with the knife, who is drunk and coked out of his head, is demanding 2000 euros/day from Mark Josemans to cover the income he has lost since May 5th.

          * The film ends with Mark very lucidly explaining the failures of “The Wietpas”

        • Nanacyclo/Tetramantony says:

          Better make that World War II 🙂

        • Jean Valjean says:

          thanks Malc. Am I right to think that the guy leaning on the coffee shop window towards the end, wearing a white jacket is the replacement street dealer, after the knife wielder is removed? If so it just proves that arresting dealers only opens up a job opportunity to another one.

        • Awaiting/moderation says:

          “Am I right to think that the guy leaning on the coffee shop window towards the end, wearing a white jacket is the replacement street dealer, after the knife wielder is removed?”

          I can’t say for sure, but there are now literally hundreds of them on the streets of Maastricht. I can honestly say that I have never, ever, seen any here in The Hague. my wife and I visited Amsterdam, yesterday. There weren’t any there either. The last time I was accosted by a street dealer was well over 20 years ago, near Amsterdam’s central station.

          It’s bed-time here; see you later!

  6. kaptinemo says:

    Haven’t been to het Nederland in almost 20 years, but I knew as soon as they started this business of ‘cracking down’ on the coffeeshops that things would go to Hell.

    Their system, prior to the latest idiocy, wasn’t perfect…but it worked to keep the violent crime down. (And it was very telling that, when I was there, the street dealers would try engaging you in English, first.) Now, the thugs are out of the woodwork in force.

    This is just the logical progression of bad policy reaching its’ equally predictable bad end. Most of this is happening thanks to buitenlander pressure, mainly from France, that blames its’ own prohibition-supporting, policy-caused problems on Holland.

    No wonder so many Dutch citizens, especially the Dutch farmers, think the EU is shijt and they want out, soonest.

    • Hey kid, have I got a treat for you! says:

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      Well it’s hard for France to not resent the Dutch policies. France has the highest rate of youth use of cannabis in Europe. It’s even higher than youth use in the US! Morocco is the only other European country with youth use rates higher than the US. The Dutch don’t even have the decency to match the US youth use rate, or even come close! So how can the French be blamed for resenting the Dutch?

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