Amsterdam Coffeeshop Directory Forums

Cabinet to fund cannabis pass trials
26 August 2009

The government is to invest €150,000 in a trial to introduce entry cards for cannabis-selling cafes in Maastricht.

Maastricht city council hopes introducing membership cards for so-called coffee shops will reduce the nuisance caused by tourists coming to the city specifically to buy drugs.
The scheme was first mooted earlier this year.

In addition, ministers are to put €6m into council experiments to tackle problems associated with coffee shops, where users can buy up to five grammes of the drug without fear of prosecution.
In particular they want to reduce the number of bigger coffee shops and try to reduce the involvement of organised crime.

The Netherlands has some 700 cafes selling cannabis.

The towns of Roosendaal and Bergen op Zoom on the Dutch-Belgian border said last year they plan to close down all the cafes which sell marijuana because of the problems being caused by drug tourists.

Source

I ve heard of these problems before with tourist,my question is for locals that live in these or someone familar with these areas along the borders What are the problems they have is it loud disordely behavior,crime, traffic ?? In my experince most people who get stoned and are much less likely to cause problems than drunk people. Here in Plzen we have a lot of these problems due to drunk tourist.But would never dream of closing the pubs to them

Waste of money. Most people understand how to apply for a card before a trip, it's not exactly a hard thing to do. Oh, and they wouldn't be able to restrict it to Dutch residents only, I think the EU membership of all concerned countries would prevent that, equal treatment of all EU citizens etc...

the thing our dutch guy said about this mayor....he is a fucking retard. he started hunting the growers and now hes doing the membership-shit....fuck them!

If they go ahead with this, the coffeeshops will just be replaced by street dealers. Of course many of them will also offer hard drugs for sale.

I would ask the mayor, who do you believe is causing more trouble in your city - stoned tourists or criminal drug dealers?