So won't Dutch residents with weed cards just start selling to foreigners on the street creating yet another black market?
Fucking genius.
Not a chance, no one is going to risk their weed pass for a few dozen Euros. The kind of money you'd have to pay someone with a weed pass would be unaffordable. And although even before the ban there were already people dealing in the red light district, the increase in police patrolling there would make this unfeasible as well. So basically, unless you happen to have Dutch friends your chance of getting any cannabis is neglecible.
Isn't the dutch government in the midst of a shift in power?
I may be wrong there but I believe their prime minister stepped down and there will be a general election in fall 2012 for the house of representatives.
But I'd be surprised if the new government continues where the old government left off.
Yup, the goverment has fallen and we'll have new elections in the september, but a bunch of laws that have already been signed and approven will take effect anyway and the weed pass is one of them. However the fallen government and the 4 governments before that were all right wing, but there is a good chance that a liberal government will be elected this time for various political reasons. So it might be foreseeable that the weed pass will only last 6 months or so untill the next government stops it. We'll see.
exactly. this is so stupid for the dutch government.. now their citizens will just sell to the tourists who still decide to come visit amsterdam without their strongest lure.
Like I said, not a chance. The living standards in the Netherlands are among the top 5 or 6 on the planet so there is very little reason for any Dutchman (or Dutchwoman) to risk their precious weed pass for less than a ridiculous amount of money, since they will might lose their membership forever if they get caught. And the majority of the Dutch population isn't as free thinking and open minded as rumour would have it, and they are more than happy to see the drugs tourism die down.
I actually think it's a great idea that they're going to stop selling to foreigners, though they could have handled it a lot better by only allowing those who hold a valid Dutch passport instead of all the ridiculous rules we're going to have now. Untill a few years back magic mushrooms we're also legal in the Netherlands, but a string of highly published events of foreigners acting out after having taken shrooms along with booze and weed caused an emergency scheduling of magic mushrooms which was followed by a permanent ban of all psilocybin contain mushrooms. Just because a couple of foreign tourists couldn't keep themselves in hand and completely disregarded any guidelines for safe tripping, the Dutch now have to suffer the consequences. We refuse to have that again, so I'd rather ban any foreign tourists from coffeeshops than see the same thing happen with cannabis as what happened with shrooms. As a sidenote, although foreign tourism makes up only a small part of those visiting Amsterdam each year, 90% of all shroom related ambulance calls made in the year before the mushroom ban were from foreign tourists. According to a poll by
MSN, out of 2.866 Dutch people 49% agrees that the introduction of the weed pass is a great idea, 39% disagrees and 14% doesn't know.
