Drug Tourism in Maastricht
MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — 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 southeastern part of the 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 legalized 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 congestion associated with the Dutch system is hardly suprising. The solution is to allow more coffee shops to sell marijuana; that will spread out the traffic jams. Better yet, legalize marijuana entirely; then tourists will buy from stores all over the city and country, eliminating any congestion issues. In fact, the story notes that the number of coffee shops has been shrinking due to increased regulation.
The claim that crime is elevated is plausible, since an increase in the effective population means more crime. But the story suggests that the increased “crime” is mainly trafficking in hard drugs. To eliminate that crime, legalize those drugs too.
Categories: My Blog
Zack
Even when cold logic (more people = more crime) can be applied, it isn’t because some anti-medicating bias has to be applies. It gets old.
As a medstudent I even hear it from my preceptors who deliver a whole slew of drugs to all kinds of patients ever day, but when autonomy comes into the picture, they frown as though everything medicinal under the sun should be controlled. The common person must be stupid or unable to rationally seek medication without guidance.
Marc
You don’t understand. The Dutch educate their own citizens and so most of them know to stay away from drugs. But the French refuse to educate, and so their youth travels to the Netherlands (to the dismay of one of their leaders – he lost his daughter).
Legalizations of drugs only works if it is accompanied by education. But alas, education by the government is not possible from the Libertarian perspective. Unable to see the whole picture, Libertarians advocate a “solution” that would do more harm than good.
Boy Plunger
Spoken like a true libertarian, ha!
I do not think anyone knows for sure what would be the consequences of legalizing the use of some drugs. I wonder if the same questioning happened in the days prior to lifting of the prohibition. Aside from, I did notice too the bias by the reporter trying to tie the words crime to “marijuana”.
Cannot be used as an example but having become free, or almost free and widely available online, porn has lost some of its appeal to many viewers, has bankrupt the industry and has smashed production budgets by more than half… so there is less being produced. And may be less consumed, paradoxically. I wonder what would be the effects of just making it free. Legal, but free.