October 2, 2011

French tourists angry about discrimination at Maastricht marijuana bars

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 3:28 pm

Coffeeshop owners in Maastricht have started to refuse catering to French patrons. The owners are anticipating a new law that obliges marijuana buyers to have a club card, the so-called wietpas. This card will only be available to adult Dutch residents or other legal residents of the Netherlands.

Writes De Telegraaf:

“C’est du fascisme,” an angry Frenchman yelled to the doorman of coffeeshop Easy Going on the Hoenderstraat in the capital of Limburg. The doorman had just refused him entry. Angry French people also said they felt discriminated against, and accused the doormen of racism.

Coffeeshop managers referred French tourists to venues in nearby cities. Coffeeshop Rasta Fari Boni was the only one in Maastricht still selling marijuana to French customers. German and Belgian tourists were still being served in Maastricht.

Coffeeshop owners fear that the trade in marijuana will disappear underground, where buyers will have to do business directly with dangerous criminals. It is logical to assume that this is exactly what the Rutte government wants, although I am not clear as to why somebody would want this.

(Photo of a Maastricht marijuana bar on a boat by Flickr user Thalling55, some rights reserved)

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July 16, 2010

Bureaucrats want to remove commissioned wall graffiti

Filed under: Architecture,Art by Orangemaster @ 3:11 pm
3928009539_073b9eb039

An entire year after having been commissioned by the City of Amsterdam, a wall graffiti with annexed garden downtown on the Prinsengracht by The London Police apparently has to be painted over, as it doesn’t ’embellish’ the area of downtown Amsterdam it is in. Nonsense!

Seasoned Amsterdam residents know that this bit of nannyism is bureaucrat code for ‘we’re still trying to get Amsterdam on the Unesco list and this probably won’t help’.

Why was it put up in the first place? Why take one year to devalue something you’ve ordered? Who complained about it? Does it have something to do with Amsterdam’s new, slightly more conservative mayor Eberhard van der Laan? Was someone bored at work?

Funny, Miami, New York, Munich and other big cities around the world have no problems with their London Police wall graffiti at all.

(Link: parool, Photo of Graffiti by London Police by Pierrot, some rights reserved)

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December 5, 2008

Screw nannyism, smoke the best weed and be merry

Filed under: General,Nature by Orangemaster @ 11:11 am
Cannabis Cup

I read on Twitter this morning that someone could not buy any chocolate cigarettes at the sweets shop as a Sinterklaas gift for their kids. Apparently, the shop doesn’t carry them anymore because that would encourage kids to start smoking at an earlier age. I can think of a multitude of things you shouldn’t buy your children, full stop. Will ordinary mushrooms be next? What about ice lollies?

All this nannyism (in Dutch, betutteling) is putting a damper on some people’s holiday spirit much more than any financial crisis could, it seems. Besides small cafés ignoring the smoking ban and the waves of protests and enforcement problems, many Dutch cities like Rotterdam and Amsterdam will be closing down coffeeshops (where you buy weed and hasch) that are located too close to schools. Not a bad idea per se, but why let them set up shop there in the first place? Back then, I guess the government was liberal enough to let parents explain right and wrong to their kids. Then, there’s Maastricht being pressured by neighbouring Belgium and Germany to shut shops to cut down on cross-border smoking.

Blaming the Netherlands has been going on for ages. During a speech held in Amsterdam a few years back, French President Jacques Chirac blamed the Netherlands for their cross-border dope-smoking problems, failing to notice that the Netherlands doesn’t share a border with France. That border is called Belgium. Belgium was not amused.

But, in order to show you that things are still smokin’, coffeshop De Greehouse in Amsterdam, which I had heard of even before living in the Netherlands, has just won the prestigious Cannabis Cup, well known by readers of High Times magazine, the magazine for pot smokers and growers, for some weed that sounds more like a kind of lady’s tea: Super Lemon Haze. Follow the link below for a good, educational video with much English in it.

(Link: parool.nl)

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