Netherlands' locals-only plan to fight drugs cafe 'tourism'

Published on Wednesday 18 August 2010 16:28

On a recent summer night, Marc Josemans's Easy Going Coffee Shop was packed. The lines to buy marijuana and hashish stretched to the reception area where customers waited behind glass barriers.

Most were young, few were Dutch.

Thousands of "drug tourists" sweep into this small, picturesque city in the south-eastern Netherlands every day - as many as two million a year, city officials say. Their sole purpose is to visit the city's 13 "coffee shops," where they can buy varieties of marijuana with names like Big Bud, Amnesia and Gold Palm without fear of prosecution.

It is an attraction Maastricht and other Dutch border cities would now gladly do without. Struggling to reduce traffic jams and a high crime rate, the city is pushing to make its legalised use of recreational drugs a Dutch-only policy, banning sales to foreigners who cross the border to indulge. But whether the European Union's free trade laws will allow that is another matter.

The case is being closely watched by legal scholars as a test of whether the European Court of Justice will carve out an exception to trade rules - allowing one country's security concerns to override the EU's guarantee of a unified and unfettered market for goods and services.

City officials say they have watched with horror as a drug tolerance policy intended to keep Dutch youth safe - established long before Europe's borders became so porous - has morphed into something else entirely. Municipalities like Maastricht, in easy driving distance from Belgium, France and Germany, have become regional drug supply hubs.

Maastricht now has a crime rate three times that of similar-size Dutch cities farther from the border."

They come with their cars and they make a lot of noise and so on," said Gerd Leers, who was mayor of Maastricht for eight years. "But the worst part is this enormous group is an attractive target for criminals who want to sell their own stuff, hard stuff, and they are here too now."

Last month, Maastricht won an early victory in the battle. The advocate general for the European Court of Justice, Yves Bot, issued a finding that "narcotics, including cannabis, are not goods like others and their sale does not benefit from the freedoms of movement guaranteed by European laws".

However, John Deckers, a spokesman for the Maastricht coffee shop owners' association, said of the ruling: "There is no way this will hold up. It is discrimination against other European Union citizens."

Many residents of border towns criticise Belgium, France and Germany for tolerating recreational drug use but banning the sale of drugs.

"They don't punish small buyers," said Cyrille Fijnaut, a law professor at the University of Tilburg. "But they don't have their own coffee shops, so that leaves us as the suppliers. Our policy has been perverted."