For awhile, many people were concerned that the smoking ban would bring an end to the Netherlands famous “coffee shops.” And if this were the case, come July 1st, some 200 businesses in Amsterdam alone would be no longer.

The future of coffee shops in the Netherlands is still an uncertain one, but for the time being they will be safe. Patrons will still be allowed to buy and smoke marijuana in designated coffee shops but they will not be allowed to smoke tobacco. The enforcement of that will be interesting I’m sure!

I must say that as a smoker and a new resident to the Netherlands, I just find the smoking ban to be very un-European. For the moment you can still smoke cigarettes in just about every sit down restaurant in the country, but in a week it will be no more. Another freedom in another country gone.

So for anyone interested in visiting the Netherlands and checking out the unique coffee shop culture, buy your tickets soon. The days on those are numbered and one day soon they will be a fun little tale about the way things used to be.

photo credit: personal collection

Post from: Sirened

In 2007, there were 168,900 deaths in Florida. 2,328 of these deaths were caused by pain killers (Vicodine, Oxycontin, etc.), 743 deaths were due to benzodiazepines (Xanax, Valium, etc.) and alcohol was judged to have been the killer 466 times (it was in the bodies of 4,179 people that died).

The deaths from all illegal drugs (cocaine, heroine, ecstasy, etc.) came in at 989. The real kicker here, numbers of deaths from marijuana: 0. Yup, none, not a single person in the state of Florida died from the use of marijuana in 2007.

And yet marijuana is not only illegal in the United States, but people get arrested and get caught up in the system over a joint. I’m not saying that the USA should legalize marijuana, but at least decriminalize it, this was a big issue for former Senator Mike Gravel who was thrown out of the democratic presidential debates. And of course the rest of the democrats completely ignored the serious issue of a rising prison population due to bullshit.

In the Netherlands, soft drug use is viewed as a health issue, not a criminal issue. Nobody gets arrested for smoking a joint. If a police officer sees someone smoking a joint in a public place where they obviously should not be smoking (ie. not a designated coffee shop or desolate area in the park), that person will get chewed out and told to put it out, they will not go to jail over crap.

Of course, decriminalizing marijuana would eat into the profits of drugs companies, whose drugs kill more people than all street drugs combined.

photo credit: personal collection

Post from: Sirened