Cannabis pass abolished? Not really
Half-baked compromise in Dutch government coalition agreement continues disastrous coffeeshop policy
The new coalition government of conservative liberals (VVD) and social-democrats (PvdA) presented its coalition agreement on Monday. They agreed to abolish the cannabis pass, but access to coffeeshops remains limited to residents of the Netherlands. Customers need to identify themselves with an identity card or a residence permit together with a certificate of residence. Non-resident foreigners are still banned. In other words, there will be no cannabis pass, but the policy continues.
However, the new agreement also specifies that implementation of the residence criterion will be done in consultation with the municipalities concerned and if necessary in stages. The implementation also depends on municipal coffeeshop and security policies in order to allow “a tailor-made approach per municipality.” The agreement has all the signs of a half-baked compromise between two diametrically opposed positions of the two parties involved, in which the VVD has the upper hand in continuing the disastrous policy they started during the previous right-wing government.
The only loophole seems to be in the phrase about “a tailor-made approach per municipality”, which is the only concession to the resistance among many mayors and city councils that oppose the pass. The mayors of the four largest cities in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht) openly spoke out against the nationwide introduction of the pass scheduled for January 1, 2013. Rotterdam mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb (PvdA) said the cannabis pass does not work and will never work. It just causes more public disorder and street dealing. The largest police union also said that the pass did not work. They qualified the pass as a political decision without any focus on a realistic policy that would solve the problem.
The coalition agreement appears to pave the way for the big cities to determine their own policies, but there has not yet been any official statement on how this will be implemented. The VVD will get the post of the Minister of Justice which will go to current minister Ivo Opstelten, who introduced the cannabis pass. The social-democrat PvdA campaigned against the pass and advocated the regulation of cultivation and supply to the backdoor of the coffeeshops, which is currently still left to the black market. They essentially gave in to the law-and-order approach of the VVD.
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