A week after a contentious roll-out of a new Dutch law to stub out cannabis sales to foreigners, enforcement is in disarray as some police are untrained and several coffee shops have closed in protest.
Drug tourists are simply dodging the “cannabis card” law by heading elsewhere in the country for their fix, since the rule has come into force in just three southern Dutch provinces so far.
“It takes time for everything to be put into place,” Justice and Safety Ministry spokesman Charlotte Menten admitted this week.
The law came into effect on May 1 and effectively transforms coffee shops into private clubs as it requires around 80 cannabis cafés in the south to sell only to signed-up members who live in the country.
Its coverage widens nationwide to 590 other coffee shops in 2013 and is aimed at curbing drug tourism-linked disturbances such as late-night rabble-rousing, traffic jams and illegal drug pushing.
Each shop is allowed to have just 2,000 members, who must be over 18 and permanent residents of the country.
But in the tourist-friendly city of Maastricht, now the focal point of a Dutch resistance against the new cannabis law, 14 coffee shops have shut their doors in protest, calling it “discriminatory” and bad for business.
Leading the Maastricht protest, Easy Going coffee shop was open on May 1 and 2 but promptly slapped with a note of summary closure by the municipality for selling dope to Belgians and Germans.
“We’re going to court,” said Easy Going’s owner Marc Josemans, who also chairs Maastricht’s association of coffee shops. “We were waiting for only one thing: the municipality to close us down.”
Willem Vugs, who chairs the southern university city of Tilburg’s association of coffee shops complained that “the government wants to implement a nationwide solution to address a local problem in Maastricht”.
He said there is “little or no nuisance from coffee shops” in his city and that business was suffering due to the new law.
But enforcement of the new rule was also patchy, with police in Eindhoven still undergoing training on cannabis checks.
In other areas such as Den Bosch, Oss and Uden, police said: “Cannabis controls are not a priority.”
Drug tourists, meanwhile, are simply going where the new rules do not yet apply, such as Nijmegen, a city about 140 kilometres from Maastricht.
“In recent days, we are spotting cars with Belgian plates in the city centre, who are clearly there for the coffee shops,” said a Nijmegen police spokeswoman Florian Vingerhoeds.
“Before the ban, we never saw Belgian plates.”