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  Drive-Ups To Feature Weed
Posted by FoM on February 24, 2002 at 11:15:57 PT
By Daniel Rubin, Inquirer Staff Writer 
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer  

cannabis Each day thousands of giggling Germans flood the streets of this beleaguered border town - a place where soft drugs are legal, the locals are fed up, and authorities have a solution that's thoroughly, pragmatically Dutch: Drive-through marijuana stores.

The idea is to make it easy for Teutonic drug tourists to turn around and go home after making quick buys at two drugs-to-go shops that authorities want to place near the border.

Venlo residents call the solution McDope.

But the German drug tourists are only half the problem in Venlo. Hundreds of "runners" - street reps for more than 60 illegal drug houses - have taken over the corners and sidewalks along the Maas River, hawking their wares to passersby, even if the passersby happen to be 70-year-old women bicycling to the library.

"It's not comfortable anymore - young people keep offering you drugs," said one such resident, a grandmother named Helene - no last name, please - who was pedaling through the riverside strip on a recent Saturday in search of a new detective novel. "It's getting worse and worse and worse. This is a gone place."

The city of 35,000 in Holland's Limburg region is a half-hour drive for 15 million Germans packed into the German industrial belt across the border. After World War II, Germans started flocking to Venlo on weekends to shop for household staples, which were much cheaper in Holland. The Germans called it Butterfahrt - butter trip.

Now their children come for Purple Haze and Wonderboy.

"Hashish? Hashish?" There's nothing hushed about the invitations hurled at those who walk down the strand of tattoo parlors, sex shops and smoky cafes along the Maas River. A blonde pulls her Maserati with German plates onto the sidewalk, and a crowd mobs her window.

The runners are Turks and Moroccans who live in Venlo, said Hans van Berkum, leader of the ruling Christian Democrat party in the city council. He said immigrants from those countries control the business, which officials estimate is as much as $40 million a year.

Possession of up to 5 grams of marijuana is legal in the Netherlands. Authorities in Venlo have licensed five establishments, known as coffeehouses, to sell small amounts of marijuana.

German authorities were not immediately wowed by the idea of McDope. They had been unaware of the magnitude of the problem in Venlo, said Hans-Josef Kampe, a legislator and drug counselor across the border in the German town of Viersen. "At first, the Venlo mayor told us, 'It's only because of you that we have this problem.' I said, 'Wait a moment. You offered something. You created this supply. That gave rise to demand from our side.' "

The Germans thought only a few hundred of their young people bought marijuana in Venlo, Kampe said. "When we found out it's actually 2,000 to 4,000 people a day, we said, 'We won't leave you alone with this.' "

That explains why German police officers will soon be walking a beat in the Dutch town. "It will surely be a deterrent to see your own police officers watching you even when you are across the border," Kampe said.

While the German officers will "provide information about what's legal and what's not," they say they have bigger aims than harassing those who buy at the border.

"We are not going to point binoculars at those who go through the drive-throughs and stop their cars once they are on our side," he said. "We are not interested in users carrying 2 grams. The cars we are trying to stop pick up their supplies in totally different places. Large quantities of hard drugs is what we are hoping to find."

Venlo, in the southeast, is paying for the more tolerant attitudes of the larger cities in the western Netherlands, where only the North Sea - not a more uptight country - is the nearest neighbor, said van Berkum.

"In general, Holland is a more permissive society - towards soft drugs, toward euthanasia, toward prostitution," he said. "At the borders, we suffer more. The people are very much more annoyed than in Amsterdam. The effect on a small city is much greater than in a bigger place."

The drive-throughs, which are months away from opening, are part of an effort called Hector, after the defender of the ancient city of Troy.

The city will take applications from potential proprietors, and those who operate the five licensed coffeehouses know the money will be tempting. But at least one of them says he is not interested.

Hesdy "Easy Man" Blank, 47, a Surinam native who has run the Rasta Fari House since 1983, can't see how anything that fast and impersonal could be good.

"This isn't the idea of the Dutch coffee shops," said Blank, sipping hot tea in his low-key establishment, as reggae-man Gregory Isaacs played on the stereo. "You sit down, relax. Listen to music."

Regular customers at his shop know to order tea, coffee or a soft drink before they buy marijuana. Those who don't want to socialize and share a little of themselves, he said, are shown the door.

"Maybe I would open one [at the border], but I want to do more," Blank said. "We could give them a place under the trees in the summer. So let me make an Internet cafe, and people, if they have a problem with smoke, they can meet with drug counselors. We're not going to just throw stuff into cars. You're looking for problems."

Note: A Dutch town near Germany struggles to bring drug traffic under some control.

Venlo, Netherlands

Source: Philadelphia Inquirer (PA)
Author: Daniel Rubin, Inquirer Staff Writer
Published: February 24, 2002
Copyright: 2002 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.
Contact: Inquirer.Letters@phillynews.com
Website: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/

Related Articles:

Dutch Border Town Plans Drug Drive-Throughs
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9994.shtml

Dutch Border Town Lures Germans With Marijuana
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread9885.shtml


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Comment #8 posted by potpal on February 25, 2002 at 08:10:11 PT
'Nawlins...
Wanted to point out that in New Orleans they have drive-through daiquiri bars, you can also order beer...

Have a gander! http://www.atbeach.com/burgerlink/festpix/fest00-2.jpg

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Comment #7 posted by kaptinemo on February 25, 2002 at 06:57:53 PT:

I never would have believed it...
"...German police officers will soon be walking a beat in the Dutch town. "It will surely be a deterrent to see your own police officers watching you even when you are across the border," Kampe said.

When I was an American soldier there in the 1980's, we were told about how sensitive the Dutch were to the presence of foreign military personnel there. Too many bad memories of the last time someone with different uniforms had been there...and giving orders punctuated with 'burp guns'. We were only allowed to wear our uniforms on the Dutch military base we were living on, and on road trips to and from bases...and that was it. Civvies at all other times.

There was even a joke stemming from the fall of the Berlin wall; the Dutch were going to ask the Soviets if they could buy it and set it up on the border with Germany, for fear that the Mitteleuropan colossus might rise to threaten them again.

Now, Duitsepolitiemannen will patrol a Nederlandse city? What gives?

But the problem, as always, is hypocrisy:

..."At first, the Venlo mayor told us, 'It's only because of you that we have this problem.' I said, 'Wait a moment. You offered something. You created this supply. That gave rise to demand from our side.' "

By that same reasoning, all bars, breweries ands distilleries should be closed. The demand exists long before supply; there's no imbecilic chicken-or-egg argument to be made here. That traffic existed for as long as the Germans had the laws that created it in the first place.

Stupidity respects no racial, national, or ethnic boundaries; it's an equal-opportunity predator.



[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #6 posted by E_Johnson on February 24, 2002 at 16:14:55 PT
True social conservatism
I always thought that true social conservatism was supposed to be having faith in the traditional evolved structures of human society -- family, community, spirituality -- over the modern layers of state that are derived and distant from daily human life.

The Dutch approach of wanting people to sit down, have a cup of tea and socialize to get marijuana seems to me to be very conservative in its own way.

That must be why the experience was so strange for me at first. Being in America, one is use to being anti-socialized with respect to marijuana. You're supposed to hide and not be social in an open way.

So it was really a weird jolting experience to walk into this Dutch cafe and see all the signs around of friendliness and social attachment and concern and community and so on. It's not just the opposite of how marijuana is treated in America, but also the opposite of how we even get our food served to us in this country.



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Comment #5 posted by E_Johnson on February 24, 2002 at 16:03:14 PT
Socialization creates barriers to addiction
"This isn't the idea of the Dutch coffee shops," said Blank, sipping hot tea in his low-key establishment, as reggae-man Gregory Isaacs played on the stereo. "You sit down, relax. Listen to music."

Regular customers at his shop know to order tea, coffee or a soft drink before they buy marijuana. Those who don't want to socialize and share a little of themselves, he said, are shown the door.

The socialization process is know to be important in controlling alcohol and gambling addictions. Most people learn the correct way to manage the intoxication of alcohol and the thrill of gambling by doing these things with friends or family in a social context, where they learn customs and traditions of appropriate and safe vs. inappropriate and unsafe methods of drinking and gambling.

That's a big plus for the coffee shop system. I have to agree with them that driving through is not the healthiest way to go.

This is why I have to believe that modern civilization has an oxymoronic dimension. There are solutions to problems that are modern but are not at all civilized.



[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #3 posted by Sam Adams on February 24, 2002 at 15:26:34 PT
silly euros....
Haven't they learned anything? Just build a big-ass prison and put all the kids in there, it'll clean this up in a jiffy. Bonus: millions of dollars in your budget and several hundred public employees to build a nice patronage system for your politicians!

If everything goes as planned, you can stock the place with poor minorities, everyone else will be watching sitcoms and network info-tainment news, no one cares about voting or civic involvement, and your public unions can take over the political process! If outright apathy doesn't work, just work with the corporations to get everyone working 70 hours a week, cut vacation from 6 weeks to 2 (6 weeks? what were you thinking?), and no one will have any time to think about the future of society and government.

Remember, if anything goes wrong with the above plan, go to plan B: start bombing brown people in other countries. Never fails.......

[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #2 posted by The GCW on February 24, 2002 at 13:28:58 PT
Good wall crushing.
When Germany realizes what is happening, they may want their pie kept home and the only way to do that is allow Germans to spend their money in Germany...

3,000 people per day taking their money somewhere else.

[ Post Comment ]

 
Comment #1 posted by potpal on February 24, 2002 at 11:45:24 PT
McDobbies...
Is catchier if you would ask me.

Smoke pot, smoke pot, everybody (in Germany), smokes pot...

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