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In response to the current plans for limiting the right to buy cannabis to Dutch residents, and other related restrictions, a series of debates are taking place throughout the Netherlands during February and March. Beginning tomorrow (05/02) at the Cannabis College in Amsterdam, the Cannabis Debates are open to everyone over the age of 18 and attendance (14:00 to 17:00) is free.
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Well it’s definitely an idea only a cop could come up with, but while being surrealistic, it seems to reignite the debate on medical cannabis in a country where all drugs are already decriminalized in small amount.

Obviously the Justice Minister of the Czech Republic sees in this idea an opportunity to lower costs for his ministry not to dismiss it, but the expert quoted in the original article is right about the quality of the cannabis grown in illegal operations. It’s just not grown for such purpose.
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The City Council Can Help!

30,000 cannabis-scented cards have been distributed to residents of Den Haag and Rotterdam by their city councils. This disturbing plan aims to help people recognize the smell of grow rooms and report on their neighbours.
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Reviewed: Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, by Daniel Okrent, Scribner, 468 pages, $30 Source: Cannabisnews.

What Can Today’s Crusaders Against Prohibition Learn From Their Predecessors Who Ended the Alcohol Ban?

Of the 27 amendments to the U.S.  Constitution, the 18th is the only one explicitly aimed at restricting people’s freedom.  It is also the only one that has ever been repealed.  Maybe that’s encouraging, especially for those of us who recognize the parallels between that amendment, which ushered in the nationwide prohibition of alcohol, and current bans on other drugs.
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By Virginia Berridge:

As a historian of drug policy, my natural inclination is to turn to the past. An encounter in the mid-19th century Cambridge market place came to mind. A character in Charles Kingsley’s novel Alton Locke relates what the “druggist’s shop” was selling: “you’ll see the little boxes, doozens and dozens a’ ready on the counter…Opium, bor alive, opium!” Opium was on open sale in the 19th century; after 1868 pharmacists were in charge with minimal regulation. In the absence of much by way of effective therapeutics, the drug was central to medical practice and a mainstay of self-medication—the aspirin or paracetamol of its day.
Cannabis was a different matter. Its widespread use in the Far East was never replicated in the home country. Queen Victoria did not, despite recent claims, use cannabis in childbirth, although her physician, William O’Shaughnessy, wanted to introduce the drug into medical practice. Uncertainty of its action limited its use and differentiated cannabis from opium, whose alkaloids, codeine, morphine, and later heroin, gained it a central role in developing professional therapeutics.
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Coffeeshops will be effectively restricted from selling cannabis to non-residents, and Amsterdam is no exception. The controversial ‘weed pass’ system planned by the new Dutch government is not in conflict with the European treaty on free movement of goods, nor the current anti-discriminatory legislation, it was announced yesterday.

Will tourists still be allowed to share cannabis bought by a resident?

Christmas in Germany seems to turn into a cannabis feast looking at the recent busts made by the police.
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Plans released this month for a pass system to exclude non-residents from Dutch coffeeshops are causing concern amongst cannabis? users around the world. Citing the problems of crime and ‘social nuisance’ caused by foreign tourists smoking cannabis, the new and still unstable coalition government wants to make the coffeeshops into private clubs where only adults who live in the Netherlands can become members.
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In a contest that pitted the legal establishment against activists that have long sought the measure’s approval, California voters snuffed out a proposal that would have legalized recreational marijuana for adults over age 21 and permit the state to tax commercial sale of the drug.

California was the only state with a measure on recreational pot, but South Dakota and Arizona ballots included medical marijuana initiatives, South Dakota’s Measure 13 went down in flames, 63 percent to 37 percent. Arizona’s Proposition 203 was statistically on the fence, though no-votes were ahead by about 7,000 with 92 percent of precincts reporting early Wednesday morning. There are currently 14 states, and the District of Columbia, with forms of medical marijuana laws.
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