Miss Fidget.com

Due to it’s latitude, Amsterdam, like many parts of the world, has long days during the summer. There’s nothing like 18+ hours of daylight to induce a touch of gleeful madness. In Amsterdam, on the last night to legally smoke anywhere, a circus giraffe also kicked open cages and freed a number of animals which were roaming peacefully on the tidy streets of Amsterdam. Which no doubt means, that people who’d been up all night smoking (not hard to do when the nights are short, the hard part is finding a bar open at 7 am) who saw 15 camels strolling towards the gracht.

The smoking ban in Amsterdam is intended to curb smoking in public places, like hotels, bars and restaurants. Hanging out in a crowded, jumping, hot, lively, Brown Bar (not a coffee shop) on a summer night can so thoroughly smoke a lass you’ll stay up all night to avoid being spiral sliced and will yellow even the whites of ones eyes.

Even Ireland has banned smoking in pubs, but the tricky bit in Amsterdam is the Coffee Shops, where things other than tobacco are discretely sold and smoked. It gets tricky because tobacco is almost always mixed with other stuff and then smoked. The custom, apparently, is to use an extra long paper and roll up a piece of cardboard to place on the mouth end as a filter/mouth piece then mix tobacco with well, what have you, and roll it up and puff away while quietly sipping coffee or juice. (Booze is sold in Brown Bars not Coffee Shops)

Read the article below for fears of how this is the first step to crack down on the coffee shops of Amsterdam.

Circus escape: Dutch wake up to camels and zebras in city street
The Guardian UK | Tuesday July 1, 2008
Amsterdam police say 15 camels, two zebras and a number of llamas and potbellied swines escaped from a travelling Dutch circus yesterday after a giraffe kicked a hole in their cage. A police spokesman, Arnout Aben, said the animals wandered in a group through a nearby neighbourhood for several hours after their 5.30am breakout. They were later rounded up by police and circus workers. Aben said people fed some of the animals, but they were tame and nobody was hurt. “You have to imagine somebody rubbing his eyes first thing in the morning seeing 15 camels walking past,” he said.

Dutch smoking ban spells disaster for ‘coffee shops’
www.radionetherlands.nl | By Rutger van Santen* | 30-06-2008
Smokers have been warned: from 1 July it will be illegal to light up a cigarette in Dutch bars and restaurants, but what will this mean for the many world famous ‘coffee shops’ in which soft drugs can be freely bought and used? Many coffee shop owners are worried that the authorities will use the new legislation to clamp down on the industry.

From the start it was clear that the new smoking ban in the Netherlands would apply to public places like hotels, bars and restaurants, as well as nightclubs, sports centres and cinemas. But will it also extend to these coffee shops?

In these special cafés, of which there are more than 700 in the Netherlands, customers are allowed to buy a maximum of three grams of marijuana or hashish. Many customers linger in the coffee shop to smoke a joint and enjoy a coffee or fruit juice.

Separate smoking room
A majority in parliament wanted to exempt coffee shops from the ban. There was concern that the government was seeking to use anti-smoking policy to restrict coffee shops and toughen up drugs policy via the back door.

Health Minister Ab Klink however, took no notice: in future smoking will also be taboo in coffee shops. Smokers will only be able to light up if there is a separate smoking room. The sale of the soft drugs has to take place in a smoke-free area. However, smoking pure marijuana or hashish - without tobacco - will be allowed throughout the premises.

Coffee shop owners suspicious
A brief tour of coffee shops in the Netherlands reveals that the owners and managers are particularly concerned about the possible consequences of the smoking ban.

They are worried that local governments, which are responsible for enforcing the ban, will use it as a roundabout way of getting rid of coffee shops. Nearly all the coffee shop owners wish to remain anonymous to avoid attracting attention from the authorities. One Amsterdam owner is pessimistic about the future:

“The Lower House has said the government can’t sneakily clamp down on coffee shops like this, but it’ll happen anyway. We still don’t know exactly where we stand. Do we have to forbid customers from smoking joints or not? Many shops don’t have the room to rebuild. If we can only stay open as an outlet for soft drugs, we’ll lose our guaranteed turnover.”

Elsewhere in the country there is also uncertainty about what exactly is going to happen, and there is a suspicion of local government. Take one coffee shop in Tilburg, for example, which has previously seen fierce protests against the so-called “back-door policy” in the Netherlands.

The policy refers to a system whereby coffeeshops are allowed to sell marijuana and hashish to their customers via the “front door”, but are not to buy in supplies via the “back door”. The manager of this particular coffee shop isn’t very keen to comment on the smoking ban, he shrugs:

“The mayor here has already got it in for us and now he has an easy way of dealing with us. There are already stories going round that after three or four fines for smoking, they’ll shut down your business. The Lower House [of parliament] needs to be a lot more alert to the way local authorities are dealing with the new policy. But they say this and that about it and then there’s deafening silence again.”

Coffee shop neighbourhoods at risk
Another coffee shop owner, also from Tilburg, takes a rather more pragmatic view than many others in the trade. He isn’t worried about his turnover falling after 1 July, but does foresee major problems for residents living in the vicinity of a coffee shop if customers are no longer allowed to smoke inside. Furthermore, he has no doubt the resulting problem will end up in the local government’s lap:

“They’ll be faced with lots of problems and they’ll only realise afterwards.That’s how it always goes. Something has to happen before the government takes action.” The smoking ban in bars and restaurants hasn’t come without a struggle, and the ban in coffee shops has been particularly contentious. After all, the only reason you go to a coffee shop is to smoke.

“It’s like banning alcohol in bars,” sighed conservative VVD MP Edith Schippers during one of the many heated debates in parliament on this issue.

* RNW translation (mb)