Berlin & The Hague; Dutch Coffee Shop Joint Operation

Joint operation
Friday October 24, 2003 - The Guardian UK
Under pressure from both Berlin and the Hague, Dutch coffee shop culture is under threat, writes Andrew Osborn

A thick pall of sweet-smelling hashish has hung over the Netherlands since the first "coffee shop" opened its doors in 1972.
Since then, the country's famously relaxed drug laws have attracted droves of weed lovers from across the globe and earned the country a sometimes controversial reputation for unparalleled liberality.

At its peak in 1997 the country's network of coffee shops ran to almost 1,200 cafes where anyone over 18 could exercise their legal right to buy up to five grams (a sixth of an ounce) of marijuana at a time. But thirty years later, the novelty appears to have worn off and the increasingly conservative Dutch authorities are drawing up plans to turn back the clock.

With the conservative Christian Democrat party holding sway in the latest three-party coalition and the Labour party consigned to opposition, the country's traditionally liberal approach towards drugs are up for review.

This week the Dutch public got a foretaste of exactly how the government is planning to sweep aside decades of tolerance, when justice minister Piet Hein Donner publicly outlined plans to allow only Dutch citizens to visit coffee shops.

In a move designed to tackle the perceived scourge of drug tourists, he said that coffee shop customers should be asked to show their passport and prove that they live locally before being served.

Concerned too about the prevalence of hard drugs in the Netherlands, he threatened to withdraw the landing rights of any airline regularly found to be transporting drug smugglers from former colonies such as the Antilles and Surinam.

His comments come hot on the heels of a decision to ban Dutch police officers from frequenting coffee shops, the construction of emergency jail cells for drug smugglers and a tough new anti-smoking law which stipulates that employees should not be exposed to tobacco smoke.

The Dutch coffee shop business, it is fair to say, is not what it once was.

New figures show that the number of drug cafes fell to 782 legal establishments last year from 1,200 in 1997, a drop of over 30%. In the past six years hundreds of coffee shops found to be flouting the law by offering harder drugs or selling to underage customers were shut down - either permanently or temporarily - and had their sales licences revoked.

This latest crackdown appears, however, to be far more serious than anything which has preceded it. The Dutch government is under mounting pressure to take action from neighbouring Germany, which sees thousands of its citizens flood across the border in search of marijuana every day.

Many of the dozens of towns that squat on the Dutch side of the border between the two countries have been transformed into open-air drugs supermarkets.

The problem is at its worst in Venlo, a town of 90,000 people nestling on the banks of the river Maas in the south of the country. Just five minutes drive from the German border, it is awash with drugs, dealers and tourists. Five million Germans live within 30 miles, and as many as 4,000 of them visit every day.

Angered by such liberality on its doorstep, Berlin wants nothing less than a total ban on soft drugs in the Netherlands.The Dutch authorities seem unlikely to go that far but they do mean business. A treaty allowing the German and Dutch police to cooperate in border regions is likely to be signed soon and the Dutch government is reportedly close to drawing up new narcotics legislation.

The Dutch government may, however, find the going uphill. It wants local councils and coffee shops themselves to stop foreigners from buying pot, but neither seem keen to comply. Both the councils and the cafes say they believe that the move would merely push the entire drugs trade underground and force people to buy off street dealers and criminals.

There is also the small matter of money. In 1999, the latest year for which figures are available, Dutch coffee shops turned over €300m (£210m) - money which is all subject to government tax.

The Dutch government is therefore faced with a stark choice: to keep taking the money or to appease the Germans.