Personal Use Is OK; the Target Is Growers Who Steal Power; Scratch-and-Sniff Cards

ROTTERDAM, Netherlands-Fire up a joint in the Netherlands? No big deal. Grow marijuana? That's a crime. Getting smoked: the nation's power companies. Volt-hungry pot farms have been stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of electricity a year. The problem has gotten so bad that one firm has blown a fuse. Stedin Netbeheer BV, a grid operator with 1.8 million customers, is now sending employees on raids with armed police officers, using sophisticated grid analysis to unearth pot plantations.

[continues 984 words]

Dutch Town Can Refuse To Sell Marijuana To 'Drug Tourists,' Ruling Says

Europe's top court ruled Friday that Dutch authorities can bar foreigners from cannabis cafes, upholding a border town's restriction as a justified measure to combat drug tourism.

Inundated by foreign visitors, the town of Maastricht, near the Belgian and German borders, imposed a new law in 2005 to prohibit marijuana-selling "coffee shops" from admitting people who do not reside in the Netherlands.

Maastricht's 14 pot cafes attract around 10,000 visitors every day, or 3.9 million a year, and 70 per cent of them are not from the Netherlands, according to town data cited by the European Court of Justice.

[continues 137 words]

MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands - On a recent summer night, Marc Josemans's Easy Going Coffee Shop was packed. The lines to buy marijuana and hashish stretched to the reception area where customers waited behind glass barriers.

Most were young. Few were Dutch.

Thousands of "drug tourists" sweep into this small, picturesque city in the southeastern part of the Netherlands every day - as many as two million a year, city officials say. Their sole purpose is to visit the city's 13 "coffee shops," where they can buy varieties of marijuana with names like Big Bud, Amnesia and Gold Palm without fear of prosecution.

[continues 1018 words]

LUXEMBOURG-A Dutch city was within its rights to bar so-called coffee shops from selling marijuana and hashish to foreigners in an effort to clamp down on drug tourism, an adviser to the European Union's top court said Thursday.

The nonbinding legal opinion from the European Court of Justice's advocate general, Yves Bot, said the city of Maastricht could prohibit drug sales to foreigners even while sales to Dutch citizens were tolerated.

The advocate general said drugs "are not goods like others and their sale does not benefit from the freedoms of movement guaranteed by European Union law" because they are illegal outside the Netherlands, the court said.

[continues 734 words]

A plan to transform cannabis-vending coffee shops near the Belgian border into private clubs from Jan. 1 has been postponed indefinitely for further study, a Dutch official said yesterday.

"We need to finalize our preparations before we can put the project into operation," Petro Hermans, a project officer for the southeastern city of Maastricht, told AFP.

"We are studying the legal feasibility of the project," he said, adding the date of Jan. 1 "was not practicable."

The mayors of Maastricht and seven other municipalities in the southern Limburg province announced last May that about 30 coffee shops within their borders would become private members' clubs from this year.

[continues 121 words]

The Dutch are among the lowest users of marijuana or cannabis in Europe despite the Netherlands' well-known tolerance of the drug, according to a study published on Thursday.

Among adults in the Netherlands, 5.4 per cent used cannabis, compared with the European average of 6.8 per cent, according to an annual report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, using latest available figures.

A higher percentage of adults in Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic and France took cannabis last year, the EU agency said, with the highest being Italy at 14.6 per cent. Usage in Italy used to be among the lowest at below 10 per cent a decade ago. Countries with the lowest usage rates, according to the Lisbon-based agency, were Romania, Malta, Greece and Bulgaria.

Cannabis use in Europe rose steadily during the '90s and earlier this decade, but has recently stabilized and is beginning to show signs of decline, the agency said, owing to several national campaigns to curb and treat use of the drug.

[end]

The Dutch cabinet wants to discourage foreigners from coming to the Netherlands to buy drugs by limiting the amounts permitted to be sold and by only allowing debit card payment, the government said on Friday.

The Netherlands has one of Europe's most liberal soft drug policies with legal use of marijuana but some cities at the border near Belgium want to close down marijuana-selling coffee shops because they are drawing too many foreign visitors.

"Several pilots should lead to smaller, locally-focussed coffee shops. In a pilot in Limburg the bar to buy cannabis will be raised," the government said in a statement.

[continues 97 words]

The Dutch Start Getting All Uptight And Shit

We've all heard tales of Amsterdam: the great European city of bacchanalia. Arriving by train, weary travellers walk along a canal that radiates outward from Centraal station and venture down any of the many narrow side streets that splay forth from each canal, leading to the city's best-known attractions. From the live sex shows and scantily clad prostitutes of the red light district to the so-called "coffee shops" where modest portions of cannabis and hashish can be bought and smoked, the city's core is brimming with a degree of naughtiness that comparatively puritan North Americans find jaw-dropping.

[continues 818 words]

Dutch police unveiled the brand new "Cannachopper" on Tuesday, the latest addition to their crime-fighting arsenal. The unmanned mini-helicopter is fitted with diagnostic and surveillance instruments allowing it to detect cannabis plants from the air.

The Organized Crime Task Force developed the chopper, which can stay in the air for hours at a time. The Dutch police are hoping to make great strides in their bid to uncover illegal cannabis plants.

The cultivation of the plant is a big business in the Netherlands, with profits estimated to have reached over 2 billion in 2008 alone. Only around 10 percent of the crops are sold legally in the country's many coffee shops, according to the Dutch police. The vast majority of it is smuggled abroad.

German police in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia greeted the Dutch invention, saying that most of the hash and marijuana smuggled into Germany comes from the Netherlands.

[end]

Cannabis cultivation skills which could bring brothers Tim and Dave A'Court jail terms in Whangarei where they lived as teenagers, have made them successful businessmen in Amsterdam.

The Kiwiseeds company they set up in the liberal Dutch city five years ago has since won three Cannabis Cups awarded by High Times, a New York-based magazine with an international circulation advocating the drug's legalisation.

Tim, 40, and Dave 37, were born in Britain and moved to New Zealand with their mother when they were infants, living first at Ruawai, then Dargaville and settling in Whangarei after a brief stint in Tauranga.

[continues 232 words]

By the time the shooting ended, the A73 south of Nijmegan was littered with bullet casings, and one man lay dead in his car with another sprawled wounded in the passenger seat.

The survivor refused to talk to police, even though a hired assassin had pursued his vehicle shooting at it without hitting for several miles before finally catching up and riddling it with automatic fire.

Commuters were horrified, but the murder in September was wearily familiar to detectives who have dealt with 25 gangland-style killings in suburban southern Holland over the past three years.

[continues 1085 words]

AMSTERDAM-In the dim labyrinth of the Red Light district, buxom women pose in glass cubicles like a Victoria's Secret catalogue come to life, drawing appraising glances from buyers and nervous smirks from men too timid to sample the wares.

But cheek by jowl with the punters are groups of solid citizens tramping the cobbles en route to historic churches, led by guides dutifully reciting the city's Protestant past.

Across town in the bustling Leidseplein, Amsterdam's most famous marijuana spot is lighting up for the evening - the Bulldog Palace's cavernous interior decorated for Christmas with silvery ornaments twinkling through the gloom.

[continues 1122 words]

Authorities said Saturday they will halve the number of brothels and marijuana shops in Amsterdam's red-light district and surrounding area.

The city announced plans to clean up the district a year ago and since then 109 sex "windows," from which prostitutes attract customers, have been closed.

The new measures aim to reduce the number of windows to 243 from 482 last year, a city spokesman said.

Amsterdam also wants to close half of the 76 cannabis shops in the city centre.

[continues 108 words]

Dissent Grows Over A Planned Crackdown On Prostitution And Drugs Aimed At Curbing Organised Crime In The Red-Light District

Amsterdam has long been famed for its relaxed approach to prostitution and soft drugs, making the Dutch city one of the most popular destinations for tens of thousands of Britons on stag and hen parties.

But all that may be about to change. As part of a major 'clean-up' of the city centre, the local authorities yesterday unveiled plans to close half of the brothels and the little coffee shops where cannabis can be bought and smoked, prompting warnings that they will cost the city dear as visitors head elsewhere.

[continues 721 words]

Country Attempting to Shed Its 'Anything-Goes' Image

AMSTERDAM - The Netherlands will ban the sale and cultivation of all hallucinogenic "magic" mushrooms next week, the latest target of a country seeking to shed its "anything goes" image.

The Dutch government proposed the ban in April, citing the dangerous behavioural effects of magic mushrooms following the death of a French teenager who jumped from an Amsterdam bridge in 2007 after consuming the hallucinogenic fungus.

"The use of magic mushrooms has hallucinogenic effects. It is proven that this can lead to unpredictable and therefore risky behaviour," the Dutch Health Ministry said in a statement.

[continues 520 words]

Plans For Giant Cannabis Farm To Cut Out 'Back-Door' Supply To Coffee Shops

The Dutch city of Eindhoven has caused a stir with a plan to set up a cannabis plantation to supply marijuana to its coffee shops. The move was announced at a "weed summit", when dozens of Dutch mayors urged the government to back the pilot project in an effort to clamp down on the criminals who supply the drug.

The Netherlands, famed for having one of Europe's most tolerant policies on soft drugs, allows for the possession of less than 5g of marijuana and its sale in coffee shops, but bans the cultivation and supply of the drug to these shops. The majority of Dutch mayors say this legal "back door" has spawned an illicit industry worth ?2bn (UKP 1.7bn) a year.

[continues 541 words]

Canwest News Service

(CNS) Clandestine cannabis growers in the Netherlands net $2.7 billion US a year -- worth almost half the country's horticultural sector -- according to a Dutch newspaper report on Saturday.

By comparison, NRC Handelsblad reports the horticultural sector generates about $7.4 billion US annually.

"There is major demand from England, Belgium, Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries and, at the moment, the Baltic countries," said Max Daniel, the senior police officer who heads the Dutch agency that combats grow-ops.

[continues 57 words]

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) -- The Netherlands yesterday banned tobacco-smoking in bars and restaurants -- but weed-lovers carried on lighting up pure cannabis joints, pipes and vapourizers.

"No smoking" signs were plainly visible in traditional Dutch cafes and trendy bars, while coffee-shop owners handed out leaflets outlining the new rules and suggesting tobacco substitutes, such as a mix of herbs.

"Many cultures don't smoke cannabis with tobacco. Americans often smoke with bongs, but the Dutch are used to smoking it with cigarettes, so it will be more of a hassle for them," said Barbara Bovenkerk, floor manager at the Green House coffee shop.

[continues 171 words]

Coffee Shops; Targets Tobacco, Leaves Loophole For Marijuana

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - When a smoking ban comes into force in the Netherlands tomorrow, it may kill the buzz for people who like to smoke their cannabis with tobacco. But some owners of the famous Dutch coffee shops are staying mellow.

Fittingly, in a land renowned for its relaxed attitude to drug laws, the new rules contain a few loopholes.

People will still be able to smoke pure cannabis joints in around 700 coffee shops, something some tourists -- notably from North America - --already often do.

[continues 383 words]

AMSTERDAM - Starting next week, you'll still be able to legally smoke a joint in the famously relaxed coffee shops of Amsterdam - but for a cigarette, you'll have to step outside.

A tobacco ban that goes into effect Tuesday in the Netherlands has both tourists and shop owners, like, totally confused, man.

"It's crazy," says Jon Foster, 36, an American who owns the popular Grey Area coffee shop in the gentrified Jordaan area of central Amsterdam. "It seems totally illogical to have a business that specializes in smoking and you ban tobacco."

[continues 439 words]