Not true. In the Netherlands – the only Western nation where cannabis is sold “legally” in coffee shops – 13% of young people use cannabis. In countries that severely punish cannabis use, that percentage is much higher: 17% in Belgium, Ireland and the USA, 20% in the UK, and 22% in France.

2. Cannabis is a “stepping stone” – people who use it have a much greater chance of going on to take hard drugs.

That is true, in a sense. Someone who drinks whisky started out drinking beer; they would not have gone directly from soft drinks to hard liquor. That’s why it’s important not to get started in the first place. The Netherlands has been successful in that respect: only 12% of the entire population has ever used cannabis, as opposed to 28% in the USA and 40% in Australia. As a result, relatively few people in the Netherlands use hard drugs, and relatively few people die of a drug overdose.

3. Coffee shops are an open invitation to purchase hard drugs.

Not true. Coffee shops in fact make it possible to separate soft and hard drugs strictly. Cannabis users prefer the safe, legal environment of a friendly coffee shop and are not at all keen to make the transition to the brutal criminal world of hard drugs.

In countries that outlaw cannabis and coke, hash and heroin in equal measure, cannabis users are forced to mix with criminal dealers from the word go. Because they have already entered that sinister world, the switch to hard drugs is easy for them to make.

The statistics speak volumes. In the Netherlands, 3 out of 1000 inhabitants between 15 and 64 years of age is addicted to hard drugs. In Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Italy, Portugal and Denmark, that is between 7 and 10 out of 1000 inhabitants. In the Netherlands, 1 out of 100,000 inhabitants dies of a drug overdose; in Germany, Sweden and Finland that is between 1 and 2 out of 100,000 inhabitants, in Denmark 5 and in Norway 8.

4. Coffee shops are a nuisance for the community.

They don’t have to be. Coffee shop operators have nothing to gain from disturbing the peace or posing a threat to public safety – they could very well lose their lucrative permit – and cannabis users do not tend to make a public nuisance of themselves anyway. The many problems that arise in Maastricht have to do with the enormous numbers of cannabis tourists, some 1.5 million of them every year. That in itself already creates problems.

It is possible to make arrangements with bona fide coffee shop operators about the public nuisance their customers cause. The authorities are working to remove the shops from residential areas and relocate them to the edge of the city. The coffee shop operators have agreed to cooperate because they want to run their business without constant disruptions. It is not, however, possible to make such arrangements with illegal coffee shops.

5. Cannabis cultivation is always in the hands of criminals.

It doesn’t have to be. You can also arrange things so that legal coffee shops receive their stock from bona fide growers and distributors.

However, the Netherlands has chosen to leave the cannabis cultivation and distribution in the hands of organised crime. In other words, coffee shops can sell cannabis, customers can consume it, but no one is permitted to cultivate or distribute it. Because it has to be produced anyway, the job of doing so has been taken over by criminals (and people who grow cannabis illegally at home). In Maastricht alone, criminals earn an annual EUR 50 million from cannabis – a policy of tolerance taken to the extreme. It’s all very nice for the Mafia, but disruptive for communities in Maastricht, Tilburg, Rotterdam or Amsterdam.

6. You can root out the criminals by eradicating cannabis cultivation and distribution.

That will never work. As we have already noted, there are more benefits to controlling the front door than shutting it entirely. But if you control the front door, you have to control the back door as well, because otherwise you simply play into the hands of criminals.

Remember: if you continue to permit the sale of cannabis, it has to be supplied from somewhere. If the baker is permitted to sell bread, he has to be permitted to buy flour. And as long as you tolerate the bakers, you’ll have grain farmers and millers. The same principle applies to coffee shops: every plantation you shut down will lead to a new plantation being started up. If we evict them forcefully from the city of Maastricht, they’ll crop up in the surrounding area – the waterbed effect.

You can, of course, decide to shut down the bakeries, that is the coffee shops. At least you’d be consistent that way. If the Dutch government doesn’t want to control the back door, then Maastricht will be forced to take a hard stance and clean up the city. But just like the bakeries and grain farmers, the coffee shops and plantations will simply pull up stakes and resume their business illegally elsewhere, outside the city limits. After all, people will still want to buy bread, just as they will still want to buy cannabis. We have already noted in item 1 that countries without coffee shops actually have more cannabis users than the Netherlands does.

That’s why Maastricht is proposing to place the cultivation and sale of cannabis under strict control and, simultaneously, move the coffee shops to locations where they will not disturb the peace. This policy will only work if includes both elements.

We prefer this approach because it will help reduce cannabis use, hard drug use, public nuisance and criminality. The other option is to wage war on drugs and clean up the city. In that case, everything will simply continue outside the city limits.

7. Controlling cultivation and distribution will attract drug tourism.

Nonsense. Foreigners come to coffee shops because they can buy cannabis here – a maximum of 5 grams per person – without being arrested. They could care less how the coffee shop gets hold of it.

8. It is legally impossible to control the back door.

So is controlling the front door – that is, the sale of cannabis to private individuals under tightly controlled conditions and with strict monitoring. Remember, under the Netherlands Opium Act (Opiumwet), possession of cannabis is outright illegal. And yet, our Minister of Justice has instructed the Public Prosecutions Office not to press charges against private individuals who have less than 5 grams in their possession or coffee shops that have less than 500 grams in stock.

He could do something similar for the back door too. Not legalise it – that’s not what we want – but control it.

9. The European Union will object to controlling the back door.

In May, European Commissioner Franco Frattini (who heads the unit that coordinates drug-related activities) told one of our national newspapers, De Volkskrant: The Netherlands must take its own decisions. This is a national matter, provided that neighbouring countries are not bothered by it. But they are in fact tremendously bothered by the Netherlands’ CURRENT strict approach to cannabis plantations, and have justifiably complained. If we wage war on the plantations – and that is what we are doing – cannabis production will move to Belgium and Germany. These countries have shut down a considerable number of plantations recently, but the growers then move elsewhere. After all, the market is not getting any smaller, as we saw earlier, and so the cannabis will have to come from somewhere.

10. Maastricht’s Mayor Leers glamorises cannabis use.

Absolute nonsense. The Mayor has nothing to do with cannabis, has never used it himself, and hopes that youngsters will stay well away from it. Maastricht wants to prevent children from trying cannabis in the first place. The Netherlands has been successful in that respect, and so Maastricht supports the national policy.

But you cannot remove Mayor Leers’s moral objections to cannabis by preaching. If you do, you then have to shut down the coffee shops. All that will lead to is more children using cannabis, more people switching to hard drugs, and more criminal activity.

11. There’s no point in controlling cannabis cultivation and distribution (the “back door”). There will still be criminal activity.

Right now, a third of our police force is used to battle against something that cannot be stamped out because we have given it a place in our society: cannabis cultivation. What we manage to eradicate in one place crops up in another. But if we wrest the supply of cannabis to legal coffee shops from the hands of the Mafia and pass it on to bona fide plantations, much of the problem will be solved. Our police officers can then concentrate on stamping out the remaining criminal elements. That is a much more effective approach.

12. Controlling cannabis cultivation and distribution will drive up the price, so that illegal cannabis remains attractive.

That’s unlikely to happen. The price will in fact fall because it won’t be necessary to pay risk premiums. On the other hand, it will also rise because bona fide growers will have to pay bona fide taxes and employee social insurance contributions. According to coffee shop operators, the two effects will cancel each other out. Dutch ministers sometimes draw comparisons with medicinal cannabis (the legal, highly restricted cultivation of marijuana for rheumatism sufferers, for example), but that is erroneous: the quantities are much smaller and whole armies of professors are called in to supervise and monitor every plant.

13. The THC content will fall in controlled cannabis, so the “hard-liners” will continue to buy from illegal sources.

The THC content (similar to the alcohol content in liquor) is already falling after having increased for many years. Users want SOFT drugs – they flip when they use the “hard” cannabis that temporarily flooded the market, and that’s not what they want. Similarly, pubs sell more beer than whisky. The market is self-regulating.

14. Maastricht is shifting its problems to the Belgian border

In fact, it’s the other way around. Belgium is shifting its problems to Maastricht. The courts in Belgium do not prosecute those found in possession of fewer than three grams of cannabis. In other words, they are allowed to have this amount on them in Belgium, but they are not allowed to purchase it there. To do that, they have to come to Maastricht. This policy has created an enormous problem in our city.

We intend tackling that problem by removing a number of coffee shops (eight of the fifteen) from the city centre, where it is difficult to patrol them, and from residential areas and grouping them in clusters of two or three in three “CoffeeCorners” at the city limits.

Part of the city limits coincides with the Dutch-Belgian national border. Nevertheless, on balance we will be shifting the coffee shops farther away from the national border than is now the case. The two biggest coffee shops in Maastricht – the renowned cannabis boats, whose customers are almost exclusively Belgian – are located 3.5 kilometres from the border now. In future, that will be 8.3 kilometres.

When you enter Maastricht via Smeermaas (Lanaken), you find two coffee shops in Bosscherweg only 2100 metres after crossing the border. That will now be 600 metres, but the area will be much easier to patrol. In exchange, two other coffee shops will disappear: those in Annalaan and Brusselsestraat (2.7 and 3.4 kilometres from the border respectively).

On average, then, the coffee shops will be located farther away from the border than they are now. And they will be easier to access, with better parking facilities, which will take away the enormous pressure caused by the cannabis tourists, most of them Belgian.

There is nothing wrong with those tourists, incidentally, but because they come to Maastricht in such massive numbers, they create a terrible nuisance in the narrow, winding streets of the city and its residential neighbourhoods. It will also be easier for us to combat illegal drugs trafficking in the new CoffeeCorners. The access control will be stricter than at Brussels Airport Zaventem.

Maastricht is not shifting its problems to Belgium; it is solving a problem. It is doing that for its local residents, who are fed up with the problems caused by mass cannabis tourism, as well as for its neighbours and its guests. Most of them are Belgian too, and they want to live, work, shop, go out and park safely in Maastricht.

15. Health Risk number 1

Yearly avarage dead-rates in the Netherlands as a result of:

Obesitas: 40.000
Tobacco: 18.000
Alcohol: 3.500
Harddrugs: 60
Magic Mushrooms: 0,1
Cannabis: 0

Conclusion

The Netherlands’ policy is good for public health because it results in relatively few cannabis users and only a small percentage who switch to hard drugs. It is bad for society as a whole because production and distribution are in the hands of organised crime.

We can combat that by controlling not only the sale and consumption of cannabis, but also its cultivation and distribution, subject to strict conditions.

There is another factor to consider at local level, and particularly in border towns: the public nuisance caused by the many cannabis tourists from abroad. One solution is to shift the coffee shops to the access roads, in sparsely populated areas.

A policy of this kind would require the cooperation of neighbouring municipalities that do not currently have coffee shops within their boundaries (the coffee shops are all located in core municipalities, such as Maastricht). They are far from eager to have coffee shops nearby.

We understand that entirely, but the alternative is even worse:

1. If neighbouring municipalities do not cooperate, a city like Maastricht will reduce the number of coffee shops: just enough to keep its own inhabitants supplied. The market will not shrink, and it will therefore move to the surrounding municipalities.

2. If The Hague refuses to cooperate on controlling the “back door” (cultivation and distribution), Maastricht will have to find some other way of restoring the balance, the consistency of the policy. It can only do that by shutting down all the coffee shops. If the back door remains locked, the front door will eventually have to be locked as well.

The neighbouring municipalities will face even bigger problems then. We mustn’t kid ourselves that the demand for cannabis will fall.

The real victims in all this will be our young people. They will have to buy cannabis from serious criminals who will not hesitate to sell them hard drugs as well. That is what is happening right now in France, the UK, the USA and many other Western countries, where many more people use cannabis and hard drugs than in the Netherlands.

Strict control of both the front door and the back door and a sensible policy of dispersal are the best ways of ensuring the wellbeing of those who do and do not use cannabis.

But it’s a complete package, as we demonstrated earlier. Front door, back door and dispersal should all be combined in a single policy. Otherwise we will have to fall back on scenario 2, the current European model, which means more users, more people switching to hard drugs, more crime and greater damage to society.

Back in 1998, in a public letter addressed to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the renowned FBI crime-fighter Joseph McNamara and the Reagan Administration’s Secretary of State George Shultz drew what was, for them, a notable – in fact a bold – conclusion. But it was in fact a conclusion that we too could have reached long ago, if we had forced ourselves to look at the drug problem rationally instead of from a moral perspective. The letter, which was co-signed by former Dutch prime minister Andreas van Agt, states: “The global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself.”