Good news for all tourists who come to Amsterdam to visit the city’s main attraction: the coffee shop. Amsterdam mayor, Van der Laan said on Friday he is not planning to restrict access to coffee shops to ‘Dutch Only’. He’s convinced the plans of the new government will leave space for that, now that plans for the controversial ‘Weed Pass’ have been sidelined. Tourists who come to Amsterdam to visit a coffee shop make up an important part of the city’s income.
Amsterdam receives about 7 million tourists every year and an estimated 1.5 million of them visit a coffee shop. “Those one and a half million tourists are not going to say: “ah well, then no weed for us”, they will swarm out over the city in search of drugs. There will be more street mugging, arguments about fake drugs, no more monitoring the quality of the drugs – all the trouble we had to deal with will come back”.
In the 70’s and 80’s, Amsterdam had a huge drugs problem. The Zeedijk street became the emblematic example of all the misery that comes along with pushers and junkies. “That was horrible. The city government, police and residents needed 20 years to reconquer that area,” van der Laan said.
But the problem is not that 1.5 million people who come to Amsterdam to visit a coffee shop will try to buy weed on the street. They will stay away all together and go to visit Lisbon for example, now that Portugal has adopted a more liberal drug policy. 1.5 million of tourists do not just spend money on hashish, but also on food, beer, strip shows in the Red Light District with its famous windows, souvenirs, hotel rooms, museums, shopping and boat trips. It would mean a mayor drain on the city’s annual income and many local entrepreneurs will go bust. The streets will be taken over again by illegal drug dealing, and all the problems that brings along with it. Van der Laan is not planning to surrender after winning the war on drugs by the policy of tolerance for which the city became one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
The former Dutch cabinet wanted a system that would allow only Dutch citizens to buy weed and hashish in coffee shops. They would need to register as a ‘member’ and get a pass to grant them access to that coffee shop. In this way selling soft drugs would be restricted to Dutch citizens only. After an experiment in the provinces of North Brabant and Limburg, the new government decided to abandon the “Weed Pass” and its nationwide implementation.
The Weed Pass was a disaster for coffee shop owners in the southern provinces. The idea behind it was to keep out drugs tourists and crack down on the nuisances they bring for the people living in the area close to the border. But the problems only got worse: more noise, more fighting, more crime because of drugs runners selling their wares in the street to drug tourists from Belgium, Germany and France – and it is not just weed they sell. Meanwhile the Dutch customers refused to register as “users”, and the result was that many coffee shops closed.
The original plan was to roll out the system of forced registration over the rest of the Netherlands, but the new government said they want to replace the system with another that does not require registration but will still restrict purchase of drugs to Dutch citizens. They need to show their ID and a certificate of residence when they enter a coffee shop. There will be stricter rules and penalties to prevent sales to the under age and a limit for the amount of THC weed can contain will be set. Dutch Minister of Security and Justice Ivo Opstelten said that mayor van der Laan was premature in his conclusion that the new coalition agreement offers space to allow tourists entrance to coffee shops.
The controversy continues…