Amsterdam Coffeeshop Directory Forums

By Fred Pals

March 27 (Bloomberg) -- Joop van der Zeeuw isn't a fan of indoor gardening. The civil servant will evict anyone he finds growing more than five cannabis plants in a Rotterdam apartment.

Van der Zeeuw's team of seven has shut down 600 indoor marijuana farms since the second-largest Dutch city formed the task force with police, energy companies and landlords in 2005. There are 6,000 active producers in the city, he said.

``There is still a lot to do,'' said Van der Zeeuw, 51, as a colleague checked the power meter outside a suspected farm in the western part of the port city. ``We are eliminating the smaller growers and now we're getting to the professionals.''

Dutch officials are stepping up raids on an estimated 40,000 indoor hemp plantations, which cause two fires a month in Rotterdam by tapping into power lines for lights that feed their crops. The crackdown is making it harder to supply marijuana shops with the Super Skunk and Purple haze their customers crave in a country that decriminalized use of the drug in 1976. The Dutch cannabis trade is worth $4 billion a year, police estimate.

A crop of 100 plants, which can be grown in a living room, uses as much as 144 kilowatt hours of energy a day, compared with 9 kilowatt hours for the average household. The thefts cost energy companies 200 million euros ($266.6 million) a year, or 1 percent of their revenue, according to Energiened, an industry organization.

Rotterdam is the biggest urban cannabis production center in the Netherlands. Mayor Ivo Opstelten decided to create the task force in 2005 because of the increasing risk to public safety.

Anonymous Tips

The team investigates about 100 anonymous tips each month. An energy company representative checks the meter and listens for the sound of ventilators used to aid cultivation. If both are found, police enter the building and arrest the grower.

``It is a problem to the society and the energy companies, and it only can be solved with a common approach,'' said Sjoerd Marbus, an Energiened spokesman. Energy companies want teams similar to Van der Zeeuw's to be created in all large cities.

Rotterdam's effort to limit cannabis growing is part of a larger drive to curtail the marijuana trade.

The so-called coffee shops that sell marijuana aren't allowed to keep more than 500 grams of the product on the premises at a time. Police recently stepped up enforcement of that rule, introduced in 2001, by immediately revoking the licenses of stores found violating it.

Goa, in Amsterdam's red light district, now employs ``runners'' to periodically go to storerooms over the course of the day to keep the shop supplied.

``It has become increasingly difficult to get the products,'' said Derrill Bagley, who works the counter at Goa.

`Space Cake'

Shops also are being asked to limit what they sell. Two months ago, police ordered Goa to cut the drug content in ``space cake,'' baked with cannabis, because they deemed it too strong. ``That's never happened before,'' Bagley said.

The measures are working: Amsterdam now has 241 coffee shops, down from 323 in 1998, according to figures provided by the Amsterdam city government. Last year, 2,500 hemp plantations were dismantled nationwide, the most recent figures from the Dutch prosecutor's office show.

The Netherlands relaxed its marijuana laws 30 years ago, after clashes between students and police. It stopped short of fully legalizing the drug because international treaties prohibited it from doing so.

In 2001, 4 percent of the Dutch population used marijuana, according to a 2005 drug report published by the Trimbos Institute, the nation's mental health and addiction center. The U.S. rate was 6 percent in 2004.

The Netherlands may be a victim of Rotterdam's success: hemp growers kicked out of the city are being pushed to other regions.

Rising Crime

That may increase crime and drive up prices, says Martin Jelsma, a director at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, which studies the impact of poverty and drugs. Prices reached a record of almost 4,000 euros a kilo in December, up from 2,500 euros at the end of October.

``Crime will rise, and professional growing will become harder and tougher,'' Jelsma said. ``The social damage done with this policy is huge'' as growers are forced to relocate.

The police disagree. ``There's more damage done to a neighborhood and its people if you don't root this out,'' said Van der Zeeuw.

It is most often the smaller hemp farmers that are caught, says Andre Beckers, a lawyer who has defended some growers. Larger farmers are harder to catch because they often lease industrial sites and pretend to run normal businesses.

``The policy is erratic and illogical as the coffee shops need to be supplied,'' said Beckers, who calls for cannabis growing to be legalized.

Van der Zeeuw isn't concerned. He said a February raid turned up 80 kilos of cannabis with a street value of $400,000.

``That made my day,'' he said. ``I don't feel sorry for anyone who gets caught. It is dangerous, not allowed and it should stop.''


http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... fer=europe

Belgium angry with coffee shop policy

Thursday 19 April 2007

Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt has written a strongly-worded letter to his Dutch counterpart Jan Peter Balkenende protesting at plans to move marijuana-selling coffee shops close to the border.

Maastricht city council plans to move seven of the city’s 16 coffee shops out of the centre because of the nuisance caused by so-called drugs tourists.

Belgian newspaper Het Belang van Limburg reports that Verhofstadt has reminded Balkenende his new government pledged not to place coffee shops close to national borders. The plan also breaks the Schengen treaty, the Belgian pm says.

Maastricht mayor Gerd Leers told ANP that he had already asked justice minister Ernst Hirsch Ballin what the effect of the coalition agreement would be on the plans to move the drugs cafés but has not yet had a reply.

The Belgians are worried that placing coffee shops close to the border will increase crime and the nuisance caused by soft drugs and draw hard drug dealers to the area.

http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2 ... policy.php

AMSTERDAM (Reuters Life!) - Could a smoking ban spell the end of Amsterdam's world famous coffee shops, where smoking cannabis is one of the main attractions?

No chance, says local conservative politician and coffee shop owner Michael Veling.

The Dutch may well follow other European countries in banning tobacco smoking in restaurants, cafes and bars, but Veling says it should still be possible to smoke dope.

"It is ridiculous to think that a smoking ban would be the end of coffee shops", the 50-year-old Veling says.

He says the clientele who have been coming to coffee shops to buy and inhale cannabis are flexible enough to find a way around any ban on smoking the tobacco products they routinely mix with marijuana resin or leaf in rolled paper "joints".

"You can bring parsley or old socks if you want, cut them here and smoke them, nobody will say anything," Veling said.

"Plus there are plants that have a every similar structure to tobacco and can maybe substitute for it."

A tobacco smoking ban, which could come into force at the start of 2008, may also boost the use of some of the weirder contraptions used for inhaling the active part of marijuana, THC, which gives users a high.

"Nearly all of our American customers do that anyway, using pipes or the "volcano"," Veling says in his dark, cosy coffee shop, pointing to a shiny, cone-shaped silver contraption.

The volcano or vaporizer heats cannabis to release vapors of THC and channels these into a long transparent balloon.

At the counter, a dark-haired man waits to get the air from the balloon into his lungs. Using the volcano makes cannabis consumption cheaper, Veling explains, because the drug can be used several times and is not burned like in a pipe.

"On good days, when the shop is full of Americans, we sell 100 or 200 of these balloons", Veling says.

But most European customers of his "De Kuil" in central Amsterdam prefer to roll their marijuana with tobacco into joints, Veling admits.

One of them is Czech-born, Swiss resident Pavel Kotrba, sitting near the entrance with a broad smile and dilated pupils.

If a ban came into force, he says: "I would smoke my joint on the street in front of the coffee shop, no problem".

Soft drugs are legally banned in the Netherlands but under a policy of "tolerance", buyers are allowed to have less than 5 g of cannabis in their possession.

Government-regulated coffee shops sell cannabis and can keep stocks of up to 500 g.

Coffee shops first sprung up in the Netherlands in the 70s and have been drawing tourists ever since.

So far the majority of Dutch parliamentarians have urged that the coffee shops be exempt from any smoking ban, but a more sweeping Europe-wide ban might be introduced.

Unlike many of his colleagues in the soft drug retail business, Veling, who is also speaker of the Dutch Cannabis Retailers organization, does not consider the ban a danger to the industry which he estimates rolls in more than 1 billion euros ($1.36 billion) a year.

Most of the more than 700 coffee shops in the Netherlands would not even be affected by it anyway, he says, as they resemble cannabis drive-ins, where people queue in front of counters, buy and leave.

"Some of these shops are huge and generate sales of approximately five million euros a year," he says.

Plus recent legislation banning the sale of both alcohol and cannabis together in coffee shops doesn't seem to have irked his customers too much.

"They smoke more, that's my impression."


http://www.reuters.com/article/gc08/idU ... 9320070419