City Council Scraps Tourist Ban

[Nuggz]

https://www.at5.nl/artikelen/217044/to ... neuvelt

In Dutch but luckily in today's day and age there's lots of handy translation tools (re: Google translate) to overcome that pickle

Summary:

- due to heavy opposition from with the city council, Femke Haelsma has decided to let the i-criterium initiative die without ever having seen the light of day.

- opposition was largely centered on fears of minors not only having easier access to soft drugs through increased street trade but also being roped into the trade as peddlers themselves due to economic hardships of the times.

- council questions if restrictions are needed for cannabis peripheral businesses (i.e. headshops).

- floating idea of a public consumption ban in the city (open air/outdoor public spaces).

- mayor has confirmed she won't invoke emergency executive powers to bypass the council and unilaterally implement this ban.

[DjShaggy]

Ah the result that everyone saw as inevitable.

[Nuggz]

Ah the result that everyone saw as inevitable.

Yeah, but this has been by far the most strong-armed attempt since the original tourist ban swept country and resulted in cities like Maastricht still not allowing tourists to cross the thresholds of their coffeeshops.

Fun fact - I only found recently, technically per the national government's website, in that aforementioned original ban wave that swept the country, it was in fact implemented at a national level as an amendment to the Gedoogbeleid ("tolerance policy" - aka the entire pragmatic legal framework that tolerates to various degrees sale, production, use and possession of 'soft drugs' and allows coffeeshops to operate in the first place, I digress -).

In other words, officially per the current legal version of the tolerance policy tourists are blanket prohibited from coffeeshops throughout the country. Put another way, any municipality that allows its coffeeshops to sell to non-residents is doing so in violation of the national directive. Thus it is a sort of gedoogbeleid within the gedoogbeleid, a gedoogbeleid-ception, if you will

Anyway I was surprised as I'm sure many of you will be to learn this.

[Not_the_monk]

May have felt "inevitable" this would blow over, but some of us thought that with all the school closure stuff etc over the years and eventually we lost 50% of the shops in Ams so idk, still really good news to hear Haelsma has dropped this.

Anyway I was surprised as I'm sure many of you will be to learn this.

Yeah I remember when that all came in, it was a national change in policy but only some of the municipalities decided to actually implement it. Idk really how national v local law stuff works in the Netherlands but always assumed it was basically a case of willingness to enforce.

Like a lot of stuff with the Dutch tolerance policy over the years its just a bit of a fudge really.

[brufy]

Recent article in Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... SApp_Other

[brufy]

The vote is today I think, so we’ll see what’s what.

[kush0la]

No update on this yet?

[Nuggz]

No update on this yet?

For now it's as the article I posted stated. The vote was just a formality it was already known the ban wouldn't pass, but seems like there was still some confusion in this thread for whatever reason.

The trash mayor (who by the way announced she wants to allow sale of cocaine - no bullshit - last week) still isn't letting go of this as a longer term goal, but for now everyone can breathe (in some ganja smoke) easy.

[kush0la]

Thanks for clarifying that.

Coke ? Yikes

[Marok21]

Finally good news Hopefully it will stay like that forever