This is an English translation. The original Dutch article is authoritative.
In the discussion on how to make Amsterdam's city centre future-proof for everyone who lives, works, or otherwise stays there, the focus remains time and again on tackling drugs and drug use to improve the living environment.
Whereas previously this was mainly focused on the heroin problem and later "pills" and cocaine, in recent years it is the coffeeshops that are being pointed at. With his open letter in the daily newspaper Het Parool, Jan Mosselaar aims his arrows at the cannabis tourists. According to him, they are squandering Amsterdam's World Heritage by occupying the Amsterdam canals with their cars, right where he wanted to place his garden chair. With the open letter below, I respond to his open letter;
What to do about the indignation of city centre resident Jan Mosselaar (his open letter 15 July) that Amsterdam; "once again squanders its kilometres of unique World Heritage to all those brats of cannabis tourists who, after the Lockdown, randomly park their cars on the Amsterdam canals and consider Amsterdam merely a drug paradise!"
As far as I am concerned, a rather selective indignation. Because if he finds that Amsterdam heritage so unique, why not take up the fight against all those much longer kilometres of shopping gutters? Where for every extra metre of retail space all the antique frontages in the city centre have been demolished and thousands of upstairs apartments have been sacrificed! And how to stop the trend that homes are being bought up purely from a speculative point of view. Even those belonging to another unique phenomenon, the Amsterdam housing corporations, so that the city centre is only available to the rich.
The erosion of both the unique public domain of the Amsterdam city centre and the diversity of social classes among its residents dates back to the 1960s. The bizarre thing is that since then, the public and political mores have been dominated by the idea that (paid) sex and drugs are "ruining" the city centre. And if I now limit myself to those mores, I have history on my side regarding how the Amsterdam heroin epidemic of the 70s and 80s was tackled by stopping the influx of addicts from the Bible Belt and the rest of Europe. Not with the rattling of sabres and moral indignation, but by advocating nationally and Europe-wide for the Amsterdam drug policy of low-threshold reception for addicts, heroin provision, needle exchange projects, etc.
And now the phenomenon of "coffeeshop tourism"—which is incomparable in terms of health risks and public order policy—also requires an approach based on facts, such as Amsterdam being the only (capital) city in the world with coffeeshops. Meanwhile, cannabis is the most popular stimulant worldwide after alcohol. (In that light, one might expect enormous nuisance in Amsterdam!).
Now that the legalisation of cannabis is in full swing worldwide, a trained eye can see that the pressure from foreign consumers on Amsterdam coffeeshops is decreasing. Therefore, Amsterdam City Hall: accelerate this process and promote the coffeeshop worldwide as an integral part of the legalisation of cannabis (NB: this is still an old promise to the municipal council from the late Mayor Patijn!).
Mayor Halsema; "go to neighbouring cities and advocate for regional coffeeshop policy"
Mayor Halsema; "go to Amstelveen and other neighbouring cities and advocate for a regional coffeeshop policy so that all those residents from the region are not dependent on Amsterdam coffeeshops." "Address the completely unbalanced distribution policy of coffeeshops in The Hague, stating that Amsterdam does not have too many, but the rest of the Netherlands has too few coffeeshops." (And the number is still decreasing annually!).
"Show political courage and convince The Hague that the experiment of legalising the back-door of coffeeshops is a monstrosity and that the results are too thin and taking far too long!" "Conclude a gentlemen's agreement with the most important supply companies to limit the points of sale for smart products and cannabis trinkets."
Instead of a narrow-minded policy (such as the introduction of the I-criterion so that tourists are no longer allowed into Amsterdam coffeeshops), Amsterdam must take this path to both keep its own drug policy upright and contribute to the worldwide development in the legalisation of cannabis.
And if this policy is also beneficial in reducing large-scale and small-scale drug crime and improving the Amsterdam living environment, there are only winners!
August de Loor
71 years old, born and raised in the city centre and for 50 years a street corner worker in that same city