After a favorable EU ruling, the City of Maastricht banned tourists from its cannabis cafes about six months ago. As a border city, Maastricht was a magnet for drug tourism and most of the shops were not supported (economically or politically) by the local population. I had assumed that such a step would not be taken in Amsterdam, but the city leadership has been overruled by the national government, which will restrict cannabis access to Dutch citizens nationwide. Some people are mystified that a country would take a step to reduce tourism, particularly during an economic downturn, so let me quote an illuminating analysis by an obscure West Coast academic:
One might wonder why the Dutch would not want drug tourism, given that governments normally do their best to lure tourists to visit and to spend money. The coffee shop owners of course want drug tourists and the profits they bring. But the rest of community endures more costs than benefits.
The central problem with drug tourism is one of selection: People who will travel even an hour to use drugs are not a random sample of all drug users. The same principle applies to all those Brits who fly RyanAir to Spain for all-you-can-drink weekend promotions at budget hotels, and the U.S. college kids on spring break who are drawn to similar offers in Mexico. Cannabis users as a population are not particularly prone to vandalism, disorderly conduct, and petty theft, but the subpopulation of users that will take a trip (no pun intended) for cannabis often commit these crimes, creating nuisance, distress and policing costs for locals.
A further cost to the country that attracts drug tourists is how more serious criminals respond. If you are a dealer in cocaine or ectstasy or methamphetamine, and you want to efficiently access a pool of probable customers, border towns with drug tourists are attractive bases of operations. There you will find many young men who are by definition unusually interested in using drugs and are away from whatever social constraints and norms surround them at home.
I foresee an expansion of the black market now. Folks will go, and pay a local to buy for them. Or the owners will just forget.
To a certain extent, perhaps, but for many, isn’t the whole point of the drug-tourism-to-Amsterdam is the frisson of doing it *legally*? It’s not as if Brits can’t get cannabis at home. So I don’t think this will be all that futile.
Your “obscure West Coast academic” has created an argument with enormous versatility. For example, it works just as well to convince the Dutch to ban “soccer tourism”:
People who will travel even an hour to attend a soccer game are not a random sample of all soccer attendees … You will find many young men who are by definition unusually interested in soccer and are away from whatever social constraints and norms surround them at home.
And surely soccer hooliganism after an Ajax game causes more hassles for the Amsterdam police than a Saturday night at the Smoky bar.
Dutch soccer games for the Dutch, dammit.
Passing By beat me to that objection. Tourists who take an interest in soccer, alcohol (Octoberfest), antiquities (the Parthenon, Petra), battlefield (Vicksburg, Omaha Beach) leave their social restraints behind. Heres’s another:…
(Kleiman): “A further cost to the country that attracts drug tourists is how more serious criminals respond. If you are a dealer in cocaine or ectstasy or methamphetamine, and you want to efficiently access a pool of probable customers, border towns with drug tourists are attractive bases of operations.”
Why call cocaine or methamphetamine dealers “more serious criminals” than marijuana dealers? If you assessed my performance as a teacher on the scores of my students, and different classes used different recreational drugs, I’d rather get graded on the performance of heroin, meth, LSD, or coke users than on the performance of pot heads.
Goodness. It’s as if countries where soccer (oops, football) is rampant do not in fact take special measures against sports tourists, both those travelling entirely within their borders and those coming from other countries.
What Paul said. Violence by visiting English football fans (e.g., at Heysel Stadium) led to a UEFA ban for a number of years.
When the marauding tourist communities overlapped though, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/jun/11/drugsandalcohol.football
I think Prof. Kleiman is very much right about this and I don’t blame the Dutch one bit for what they are doing.
That said, this makes the point, once again, that the main problem in our drug policy is insufficient respect for the personal liberty to take risks that other people are offended by.
The reason why these risks get concentrated in places with legal or quasi-legal drug distribution is because of prohibition policies in other places. Liberalize drug distribution and sales and the risks diffuse over the population.
You can argue the same thing happened in Prohibition. The laws and uneven enforcement concentrated the harms- we still suffer a lot of harm from alcohol consumption (far, far more than from drug consumption), but it is diffused more evenly over the population.
Malcolm, would it be unreasonable to ask you to read the posts before criticizing them? This one is by Keith Humphreys, not by me.