Turning back time

When I got back to Amsterdam last week and checked into my headquarters at the 420 Café, I received an urgent message from the proprietor, Michael Veling, in response to my last column, which talked about attempts to restrict access to cannabis in the Netherlands:

Mike has owned and operated the 420 Café (formerly Café deKuil) for more than 20 years and has been a cannabis activist even longer. He's worked through the coffeeshop registration edicts of the mid-1990s, the imposition of the on-site 500-gram limit, the reduction from 30 to five allowable grams per consumer, the replacement of Dutch currency with the euro in 2000, the banning of alcohol sales in coffeeshops in 2007 (deKuil was a bar for 100 years or so), and the proscription against tobacco smoking the next year. Through it all, he has conformed with official policy while maintaining a successful establishment that supplies its patrons with the finest of weed and hash in a friendly, comfortable environment.

Mike was also a founder of Amsterdam's coffeeshop coalition, Cannabis Bond, and is a careful observer of the political scene as it pertains to the local cannabis culture. For several years he was active in the local branch of the (then) Dutch ruling party, the Christian Democrats (CDA) — sort of equivalent to the Republicans in America — and served a term as deputy to a CDA Amsterdam council member in order to force the party to accept a coffeeshop owner into its ranks despite the party's traditional stance against cannabis legalization.

So when Mike dismissed the current government's plan to turn the coffeeshops into private clubs, "accessible only to people officially living in the Netherlands" (DutchNews.nl) in order to "reduce drugs-related tourism and public nuisance," I felt better already, because the several people I'd spoken with before leaving town had been uniformly pessimistic about the chances for survival of the established system that works so well for everyone except the anti-drug fanatics in Parliament.

I'm still trying to get my head around the proposal, because it seems totally idiotic and so drastically un-Dutch. It seems to stem from a 2009 study by a government commission, which found that "the bigger the coffee shops get, the more likely they are to be in the hands of organized crime. To that end, the commission recommended cafes become smaller and should only sell to locals," according to DutchNews.nl.

"The government is also planning to increase efforts to drive organized crime out of the production and trade of marijuana. ... The illegal growing industry is thought to be worth some 2 billion euros [$2,840,000,000] a year. According to the Dutch newspaper Telegraaf, some 40,000 people are involved in marijuana cultivation and some 5,000 plantations are busted every year."

Duh! Under the present system, where retail sale of cannabis is permitted but cultivation and distribution remain strictly illegal (beyond the five plants adults are allowed to cultivate for their own use), growing marijuana is organized crime per se.

> Email John Sinclair