New Law Threatens Dutch Cannabis Culture

The wind of stupid backward intolerance is blowing all over Europe, and has now hit the Netherlands hard. A new law will ban the selling of cannabis to foreigners, which will make working legalisation history. But I do not think it will matter much:

Technically, buying pot and hash in the Netherlands has always been illegal, but since 1976 a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy arose over possession of less than five grams. By the 1990s, pot coffee shops or “cannabis cafes” were issued “toleration licenses,” effectively allowing them to sell small quantities of soft drugs as long as they didn’t also sell alcohol. The opaque procurement of large stocks by cafe owners clearly violates Dutch law, but authorities simply look the other way.

Precisely. What will happen is that cannabis will once again be technically illegal but a ban impossible to uphold. After all, the Dutch are not like the Scandinavians in their attitude towards the authorities.

And here is a fact most campaigners against legal cannabis neglect:

Statistics show the rate of marijuana use in the Netherlands is actually lower than in the United States or Britain.

You read it right.

Nevertheless, the new law will have its severe harms on Dutch cannabis culture. Peaceful people who only wish to get high will once again be criminalised. For what good? None at all. But that’s the mind-set of prohibitionists. They just want to keep things illegal no matter what the result.