Next Monday is the premiere of the film ‘C’est Fini’ (It’s over’) in Antwerp, Belgium, a comedy film made by the Dutch cities of Roosendaal and Bergen op Zoom near the Belgian border to inform drug tourists about not being able to buy drugs anymore in both cities.
As of tomorrow, coffeeshops in both cities will no longer be allowed to sell soft drugs (hashish and marijuana). Coffeeshops that do sells drugs will be shut down for five years after a first warning. About 90% of all the drugs sold in these cities are to Flemish youth, which adds up to some 25,000 drug tourists.
The film’s plot has three Flemish guys trying to score a joint in the Netherlands. You can catch the trailer here (warning, nasty splash page).
The Dutch could just stop selling soft drugs altogether, some do say, others think that it’s still better to be relaxed about soft drugs in order to dissuade people from taking hard drugs. The current trend is that most people would probably not have the Netherlands known as some sort of coffeeshop and prostituion heaven, but hey, it’s part of the country’s identity at this point and it does attract the right tourists in some places. The jury is defintely still out on this, so to speak.
And don’t ask me why the poster has three languages on it (English = cool, French = cool to the Flemish, Dutch/Flemish = to be understood).
(Link: parool.nl, cestfini.be)


All 20 contestants of the Belgian bodybuilding championship fled the venue in the Dutch city of Vlissingen, Zeeland, yesterday when three doping inspectors entered the room. The championship was cancelled, and the 300 or so spectators had to go home without seeing a single bodybuilder compete. 
A man got arrested last Sunday after he kept his socks on for sex. The prostitute at the Doubletstraat in The Hague whose services he was availing himself of thought his behaviour was strange and asked him about it—she thought maybe he had cold feet. The man admitted that he was carrying a valuable load of drugs in his socks, and even offered to sell some of it to his supplier of sex. Instead the woman called out to two police officers who were passing through the street and who in turn arrested the man and discovered that indeed, he had hidden “229 drug balls, 32 pony packs cocaine and 2 bags of marijuana” in his socks,

