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Dutch Burghers Plan McDope, A Drug Drive-Thru
Times, The
Saturday 26 May 2001 Website: http://www.the-times.co.uk/ Author: David Lister, in Venlo DUTCH BURGHERS PLAN MCDOPE, A DRUG DRIVE-THRU FROM behind a row of giant multicoloured bongs (hashish pipes), the pony-tailed man in the Bob Marley T-shirt produced a block of dark brown cannabis resin and said it would cost 50 marks (UKP15) for five grams. "We can give you hashish, weed, whatever. Just don't tell the cops," he added, smiling. Freeshop Sky is one of an estimated 65 shops, backrooms and bars illegally selling drugs in Venlo, a small Dutch town a mile from the border with Germany where the trade of cannabis is just as often conducted in kilograms as grams. The illegal drugs industry has grown so rapidly since regular border checks were abandoned in the mid-Nineties that the local council is considering a desperate plan: it hopes to clear the trade out of the town centre by licensing the world's first drive-through marijuana bars on the outskirts of Venlo. The plan, which Venlo's mayor and 30 aldermen will vote on next Wednesday, has been welcomed in the town, where residents feel unnerved by the presence of about 300 illegal drug dealers on the streets. In some roads, up to 80 per cent of houses are thought to be in the hands of dealers, including Maaskade, where Freeshop Sky, next to the B-1 Sex Shop and Sex Shop Climax, is one of a number of souvenir boutiques and cafes suspected of selling drugs illegally. "This is a small town and drugs have taken over here," Ria, a pensioner who has lived in Venlo all her life, said. She pointed to a boarded-up shop off the town's busy main square: "In this building they had jewellery in the window and that is what they claimed to sell, but they were really dealing drugs." The drive-through idea is proof that Venlo, where so far this year police have boarded up 24 houses where cannabis was being sold, is losing the battle against drugs. The plan has provoked a hostile reaction from the German town of Viersen, just 15 miles away, while officials in the Dutch Ministry of Health have given a warning that it could undermine their efforts to promote careful drug use. The Dutch press, meanwhile, has come up with its own name for the new-look marijuana bars: "McDope". About 500 German tourists travel every day to Venlo to take advantage of Dutch laws allowing up to five grams of cannabis to be sold in the town's five licensed "coffee shops". Many, however, are in search of bigger quantities and for this they need the black market, to the extent that police now speak of a "shadow economy" in Venlo worth hundreds of millions of Dutch guilders. It has taken just six years and the Schengen open borders agreement, which came into force in 1995, to transform what used to be called "the town of laughter" into a place now known across The Netherlands for its drugs problem. "After Schengen we were suddenly opened up to five million Germans within a radius of 50 kilometres and a number of them were interested in buying drugs," Twan Beurskens, manager of the anti-drugs offensive at Venlo's town hall, said. "Before the mid-Nineties the only places with licensed coffee shops were the big cities. There was only one cafe illegally selling drugs in Venlo and the police talked about it as if it was a big problem. Before Schengen there would be a big queue to cross the border and there was a risk that you would be stopped and searched. Now you drive straight through." Although the drive-through coffee shops are just one option, if the council endorses the plan the process of awarding licences will begin almost immediately and they could be open by the end of the year. There is also the prospect that other towns might follow suit. "In general terms, I would be concerned because this idea could catch on," Franz Trautmann of the Trimbos Institute, the Dutch national centre for mental health and drug addiction, said.
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