A Dutch City Seeks to End Drug Tourism with Dutch only drug sale policy

[Liberal_in_LA]

A Dutch City Seeks to End Drug Tourism

Many of the customers for legal drugs in Maastricht, the Netherlands, are young people, and most of them are foreigners.

By SUZANNE DALEY
Published: August 17, 2010


Thousands of “drug tourists” sweep into this small, picturesque city in the southeastern part of the Netherlands every day — as many as two million a year, city officials say. Their sole purpose is to visit the city’s 13 “coffee shops,” where they can buy varieties of marijuana with names like Big Bud, Amnesia and Gold Palm without fear of prosecution.

It is an attraction Maastricht and other Dutch border cities would now gladly do without. Struggling to reduce traffic jams and a high crime rate, the city is pushing to make its legalized use of recreational drugs a Dutch-only policy, banning sales to foreigners who cross the border to indulge. But whether the European Union’s free trade laws will allow that is another matter.

The case, now wending its way through the courts, is being closely watched by legal scholars as a test of whether the European Court of Justice will carve out an exception to trade rules — allowing one country’s security concerns to override the European Union’s guarantee of a unified and unfettered market for goods and services


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/world/europe/18dutch.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

[msongs]

1. legalize it for everyone (grow yer own) and that problem will vanish with the tourist $ lol nt