It is never easy being green. However, the cannabis industry is no stranger to overcoming stigma if not hurdles. Much less the grotesque ball drops of governments as soon as they get involved—from expanding access to basic regulation.
The Dutch government has just been handed a reminder of that as its widely lauded first cultivation bid for the production of regulated recreational cannabis has embarrassingly hit the skids. It is not even something that can be blamed on COVID-19. Nor does it appear that the Dutch took any lessons from the highly controversial German cannabis tender for medical cultivation in 2017 which has yet to fully come online.
Holland is a sovereign country with 2 million fewer inhabitants than the U.S. state of New York.
What gives? How could the land of the coffeeshop fumble the ball quite so badly?
A Brief History Of The Regulated Dutch Cannabis Industry
For American Gen Xers at least, Holland became a beacon of cannasanity during the 1980’s and 1990’s. This was a period of time where particularly American Baby Boomers who had inhaled with impunity when they were in their much-heralded youth, decided to further criminalize the plant and those who grew, used, or sold it as they obtained positions of political power.
Drug testing became the bane of anyone who wanted employment in the United States.
In Europe, things were better, but only just. You can still get arrested for the possession, consumption, or selling of the drug. Just ask Spanish club owners during COVID-19. But drug testing never caught on, nor did the obscene extremes of the Drug War seen in the United States.
As a result, there is a highly profitable if not widespread “underground” if you can call it that—from the mafia and terror-linked groups to entrepreneurially minded patients with growing space and a few friends. Far beyond Holland, there are, for example, plenty of German magazines if not a whole subculture based on home cultivation that has certainly begun to organize for bigger things over the last several years as medical use has become legal here.
Plus if you really wanted to light up in public, you could always take a visa-free trip just across a border or two if you had no connected friends and did not like “shopping” in the Hauptbahnhof viertel (central train station section of town) of your local burg. In Germany, at least, this is where you find both the regulated sex trade and of course, plenty of opportunities to buy illicit substances of all kinds.
The Dutch authorities were not unaware of the situation. Indeed, various failed attempts to control the popularity of cannatourism were all tried and failed. These included trying to shut down the industry in border towns (particularly with Germany), to imposing stricter regulations in the places where the industry operated. See Amsterdam of both yesteryear and as of January 2021.
None of these attempts during the first decade and a half of the 21st Century were successful, although they created casualties of the justified and unjustified kind. For example, by 2014, such attentions and crack downs had begun to close down coffee shops in every city that operated within the immediate vicinity of schools. There are about half as many stores today in Amsterdam as there were just at the turn of the century. The other (international) victim…
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