Dries van Agt, 86, served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from late 1977 until late 1982. Of all his achievements, the one that stands out for many is the introduction of ‘turning a blind eye’ (in Dutch, ‘gedoogbeleid’) to the use of marijuana and hash 42 years ago as of January 17, 2017, which was a world’s first.

Van Agt was Justice Minister before he was PM, and together with Irene Vorrink the Minister of Health at the time, they are the reason why the world assumes pot is legal in the Netherlands when it fact, it is absolutely not. They are also the reason why the Dutch have been making a distinction between soft drugs and hard drugs since 1976.

In November 2009 Van Agt received the Cannabis Culture Award of the Hash, Marihuana & Hemp Museum in Amsterdam, but this week he was awarded the Koos Zwart Award in Tilburg, an annual award given to people who have been instrumental in moving towards legalisation and normalisation of cannabis in the Netherlands. The award is named after hash activist Koos Zwart who died in 2014 and who happens to be Irene Vorrink’s son. The former premier held a speech in 2016 at the Cannabis Liberation Day in Amsterdam to plead for the legalisation of marijuana.

And on January 17, Van Agt smoked his first ever joint (pic).

(Link: www.vice.com)

London and Amsterdam based conceptual photographer Marloes Haarmans made a series of photos of improvised bongs for Vice.

The thing that Vice, tongue firmly in cheek one assumes and hopes, tries to solve in this summer fantasy is the problem of the prototypically Dutch rained-upon music festival, where all your paper is rained wet but somehow your marijuana or tobacco arent’t, and you need something to help you light up.

Bongs made from pineapples, squirt guns, sex toys, rubber boots and airbed pumps are displayed for your enjoyment.

And that is all there is to it.

(Photo: Vice / Marloes Haarmans)

Amsterdam is currently on a mission to close down many of its coffeeshops in 2017, as some of them are too close to schools, following a policy called ‘Project 1012’, referring to a downtown postal code and one of their next targets is the city’s oldest coffeeshop, Mellow Yellow opened in 1972, albeit at another location.

The mayor of Amsterdam, Eberhard van der Laan made a deal back in 2011 with the Dutch government that if they didn’t force him to make Amsterdam coffeeshops register foreign patrons he would close down coffeeshops that were less than 250 metres from schools. However, a report from the Bonger Institute of Criminology says the remaining coffeeshops are now so overcrowded that they have twice as many patrons with people queueing outside to get in, which is disruptive.

Then there’s stories about coffeeshops allowed to stay open because schools are either closing or moving, and when a school moves then other coffeeshops may all of a sudden have a problem. And there’s the story of a coffeeshop not having to close after all because someone measured the 250 metres incorrectly. Oh, and there are newspaper articles about coffeeshops being shot at and closed temporarily, so that the actual number of coffeeshops in Amsterdam is never quite right.

Goodbye Mellow Yellow, 1972-2017, the experts think you should stay open, but not the city who doesn’t want to see the new problems caused by shutting the likes of you down.

(Link: parool.nl, a report on Project 1012Photo by Eric Caballero, some rights reserved)

While Amsterdam is busy closing down coffeeshops – the ones that sell marijuana and hash – the district of Amsterdam Zuidoost is going to get its very first coffeeshop, and I bet many people didn’t know that they didn’t have any in the first place. I didn’t know and I’ve lived there.

The coffeeshop will be close to the Bijlmer Arena station and will probably be called ‘Roots’. The city gave the green light for a coffeeshop there in 2000, but the rules regulating its eventual location were still an issue and it took a long time for it all to get sorted. The new business is not in a residential area or close to schools, so it should be fine.

(Link: at5.nl)

Besides pistachio, Antonio ice cream parlours in Ede and Wageningen are also selling ‘perfectly legal’ cannabis-flavoured ice cream imported from Italy. Owner Antonio Mulder says that it tastes like caramel and is made with cannabis seeds.

Like many other weed-flavoured Dutch products such as weed sauce for fries, it’s more about the idea of flirting with an illegal substance than hoping it could get you high.

Mulder adds that it’s probably not a good idea to suggest this flavour of ice cream to children, as it is more of a gimmick than anything else.

(Link: www.waarmaarraar.nl,
Photo by Eric Caballero, some rights reserved)

As of 1 March, the Opium Law, which governs the use of cannabis, has made grow shops illegal throughout the country. The idea behind it was to stop grow shops that have a hand in the illegal growing of cannabis, such as supplying lamps, plant food and other supplies. The price for breaking the law is a maximum prison penalty of three years and a fine of 81,000 euro.

In October 2014 the court of Groningen handed down a historical verdict by refusing to punish two cannabis growers who ‘safely and responsibly’ carried out their work. The court refused to punish the growers stating the hypocrisy of punishing ‘the back door’ while turning a blind eye to selling through ‘the front door’.

Now, even though the shops are not technically growing cannabis themselves, the law is trying to shut the ‘back door’, while continuing to allow the selling of cannabis through the ajar and very lucrative ‘front door’.

(Link: www.at5)

Dutch-American company Axim is working on the world’s first medicinal marijuana chewing gum, which will be produced in Almere, Flevoland. It should be on the market in two years and it is currently being tested on Dutch patients who have chronic pain due to multiple sclerosis. This special chewing gum will work like nicotine gum, with the cannabis being absorbed slowly by the body in some 20 minutes.

You can easily buy ‘nutraceutical’ chewing gum that contains cannabidiol (CBD), the non-psychoactive component of pot, but Axim plans to make chewing gum with THC in it, the psychoactive ingredient of pot for patients who suffer chronic pain from many different medical conditions.

(Links: www.foodlog.nl, www.in-pharmatechnologist.com)

The court of Groningen handed down a ‘historical verdict’ last Thursday by refusing to punish two cannabis growers who ‘safely and responsibly’ carry out their work, only selling to coffee shops and even paying taxes. While the court found the growers guilty of cultivating weed, it refused to punish them for doing so, underlying the Dutch hypocrisy of punishing ‘the back door’ while turning a blind eye to selling through ‘the front door’. Weed sold in coffee shops is ‘tolerated’ and still illegal, but it continues to be supplied illegally, which is often challenged.

“Coffee shops must supply themselves and so cultivation must be done to satisfy these demands,” the Groningen court said, “but the law does not state how this supply should be done.” What growers do is illegal, but allowing the sale of cannabis since 1976 in coffee shops is very hypocritical and blatantly encourages crime.

The government enjoys the tax money it gets from legitimate businesses like coffee shops, and now the back door has now been left open. Other growers could also soon go unpunished, en route to the legal supply of cannabis for coffee shops.

(Links: phys.org, www.voc-nederland.org)

Out of 42 European cities in 21 countries, three Dutch cities show up in the top 10 for drug use, according to the European Drug Report 2014 of the EMCDDA.

The trio of Eindhoven, Utrecht and Amsterdam can be described as the ‘MDMA capital cities of Europe’, respectively in positions 1, 2 and 3. Eindhoven is off the charts as far as speed is concerned, probably because it is often dumped directly into the sewers by makers.

The number one cannabis smoking wonderland isn’t Amsterdam, although Amsterdam is number two. Number one is Novi Sad in Serbia. Amsterdam, Eindhoven and Utrecht are numbers two, seven and thirteen for cocaine use.

We told you a while back that Amsterdam’s sewers are full of hard drugs.

(Links: www.volkskrant.nl, www.nu.nl)

In 2011 Amsterdam challenged and eventually won in high court the right to designate certain areas as as non-pot smoking zones. Rotterdam recently challenged the law as well and has also won its case. If smoking pot in these areas is deemed unsafe, then it becomes a matter of public order and can be legally enforced, as long as the cities take this up in their local public ordinance.

The reason why this wasn’t cut and dry was that the Opium Law governing soft drugs basically states that marijuana is illegal, again something many people still don’t know because the law is willfully ignored. And since marijuana is illegal you can’t forbid it again, as that would be crazy talk.

However, due to the oddness of the Dutch situation both cities now have a workaround. Stopping people from smoking altogether is often enough, but in many places people are allowed to smoke outside, regardless of how funny their cigarette smells.

(Link: www.nieuws.nl, Photo of No-blow (and no drinking) sign by Erik Joling, some rights reserved)