Cannabis in Holland
- The Dutch Senate has recently approved the so-called Grow Shop Law, a new regulation that will enter into force on 1 March 2015, designed to increase repression on consumers, growers and shop owners who distribute growing gear and marijuana seeds, applying jail sentences of up to 3 years. - This new law comes from the VVD Liberal Party, a business-orientated and centre-right group that forms the Government with the PvdA Labour Party, a social-democratic group which has opposed the measure, but cannot fight the majority of the former. - This law arises as another nail in the coffin of what freedom of recreational and medical cannabis used to be in the Netherlands. Although it seems to be difficult to implement it, it will definitely change things in the country, particularly in Amsterdam. - By contrast, local governments from different cities have decided to challenge the devastating policies of Ivo Opstelten, Minister of Security and Justice in the Netherlands, who is on a personal crusade against coffee shops and marijuana users, and is the promoter of WeedPass. A total of 54 mayors have signed a manifesto called “Common Regulations“, which advocates decriminalisation of the “backdoor problem of coffee shops”.
Scheerer & Valois 2017: In the Netherlands, any adult may cultivate up to six cannabis plants for his own use. The sale of cannabis is "illegal, but not punishable". The law is not enforced as long as coffee shops keep a distance of at least 250 meters from the next school and as long as they follow the rules of (1) no advertising, (2) no sale or tolerance of hard drugs on the premises, (3) no sale to anyone under the age of 18, (4) no noise or other disturbances of the peace, (5) no sale of more than 5g to each customer and no storage of more than 500g on the premises. Municipalities have the right to decide if they want to tolerate one or more coffee shops within their boundaries, and they have also the right to prohibit the sale of cannabis to tourists. Any coffee shop that violates rules can either be closed for a limited time (three to six months) or permanently.
The idea of licensing was adopted on the basis of recommendations stressing the relatively acceptable risks associated with cannabis and the advantages that licensing would have in terms of keeping hard and soft drugs separated.
The result of the de facto legalization of cannabis in Holland was an increase in availability of cannabis, but – interestingly – no corresponding increase of consumption. At a time when cannabis was intensively prosecuted in the USA, but de facto legalized in the Netherlands, a comparison of life-time cannabis prevalence rates (15-64 years) showed higher rates of people who reported cannabis use at least once in their life-time in the USA (41.5%) than in Holland (25.7%).
The legal basis of the coffee shop system is a distinction between the law in the books and the law in action. According to the Dutch opium law of 1976 cannabis possession still remains a crime, but the expediency principle - according to which an repressive intervention is not an automatic response to illegality – enabled the Ministry of Justice to assign the lowest prosecutorial priority to offenses in the sphere of cannabis consumption. The somewhat sophistic argument that international treaties just demand criminalization, but do not say anything concerning actual enforcement “stretched the flexibility within the conventions to their very limits” (185). There was, e.g., a detailed plan to iron out the legal inconsistency that is the illegal “backdoor” supply of the coffee shops. This plan under the name “Coffeeshops out of the Shadow” (1998) proposed to extend the licensing system to growers who would supply coffee shops with cannabis subject to quality control and taxation. In turn, shop owners would oblige themselves to buy from licensed growers only, thus separating the coffee shop scene from international trafficking and bringing it into the sphere of legal commerce. This plan had no chance in view of the opposition of both the USA and the UN drug policy institutions (186 f.). Consequently, the international prohibition regime forces the unique Dutch system of regulated quasi-legal cannabis sales supplied by illegal importers and growers to remain inherently fragile and vulnerable.