Vander Veen -Regulation in Spite of Prohibition in Amsterdam - 2009

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Cultural Critique 71Winter 2009Copyright 2009 Regents of the University of Minnesota

REGULATION IN SPITE OF PROHIBITION

THE CONTROL OF CANNABIS DISTRIBUTION IN AMSTERDAM

Hans T. van der Veen

COFFEE SHOPS, CULTURES, GLOBAL FLOWS,AND MODES OF CONTROL

In many respects, the coffee shops in the Netherlands constitute a

crossroads for global Xows. They bring together drugs as commodi-

ties from domestic sources, as well as from faraway production sites

such as Morocco, Pakistan, Lebanon, Nepal, and Turkey. Their stock

and trade express changes in technology, preferences, and global geo-politics that shape production, trade, and consumption patterns. Al-

though, in the last decade, homegrown cannabis has been taking over

part of the market share of hashish in the coffee shops (from some 20

to 50 percent of their turnover), these establishments still obtain a sig-

niWcant portion of their wares from actors who operate in the pro-

hibited realm of international drug trafWcking. There is a complex

relation between the front door of the coffee shop, which by virtue

of governmental tolerance has become a magnet for a certain subcul-tural tourist niche, and its back door, which leads to a very differ-

ent, though not entirely separate, domain of global circulation. This

paper explores the space between the front and back doors of the cof-

fee shop not simply to track the changing cultures of cannabis con-

sumption but also to ask what the almost paradoxical existence of this

space as both a site of regulation and prohibition reveals about the

coercive, political, and economic forces that control the global mobil-

ity of cannabis as a commodity and that deWne its modes of control.

Coffee shops bring together the carriers of the subcultures of

cannabis use in the drug tourists who visit the major Dutch cities, and

they are many. About half of the coffee shops in Amsterdam are located

in the city center. They mainly cater to non-locals. Residents would


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ratherfor conveniencepick a place in their own neighborhood,

where they are also more likely to get a better quality and price. A

considerable number of coffee shops mainly cater to immigrants andtheir children, particularly those from northern Morocco, for whom

drinking alcohol would be more intolerable than smoking cannabis,

which is the more broadly available substance in their land of origin.

And indeed, shops try to attract different clienteles by the entourage

they create and the attitudes with which they treat customers.

The social meaning of cannabis products, particularly for West-

erners, may largely be in their illegality. Many consumers believe that,

by the very act of smoking, they perform an act of resisting a dominantculture, a view that has historically been reinforced by the counter-

cultural and even intellectual prestige the substance has gained, as

registered by a variety of employments, from Walter Benjamins writ-

ings on hashish to reggae music. Such convictions, though, can con-

versely strengthen proponents of prohibition in their efforts to enlist

the strong arm of the law to weaken countercultural movements. And

indeed, the coffee shops are also at the center of regular swings inopinion-making by political and bureaucratic entrepreneurs who either

take the coffee shops as an example when arguing the decriminaliza-

tion of the use and trade in cannabis (as has actually happened more

recently in Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, and the UK), or to stress

the need for more stringent harmonization in sentencing laws to pro-

pel cooperation in international (drug) law enforcement.

Partly based on interviews with owners and managers of coffee

shops and with core actors in the governmental enforcement system,this article extends insights developed in an earlier work (van der

Veen 2003), comparing the practices of drug controlas opposed to

the policiesin quite a few countries.1 The gap between policy and

practice is important to understanding the Dutch coffee shops, as these

institutions have become nodal points for a variety of ideas and prac-

tices that shape identities and seek to inXuence the distribution of

power, wealth, and security within and between societies. They are a

source and expression of anti-authoritarian ideals as much as a focal

point for moral indignation and legal paternalism. They are also a

source for enterprising politicians and law enforcement ofWcials both

inside and outside the Netherlands who invoke their existence to

run protection rackets over populations, muster coercive state power

HANS T. VAN DER VEEN130


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against other cultures and ethnicities, or seek to establish their author-

ity at the expense of others. Where libertarian proponents of the coffee

shops can make their case by referring to the adverse effects of exces-sive forms of state coercion prevalent in other countries approaches

to cannabis, the case of the advocates of coercion rests on the absence

of social regulatory mechanisms that could make the cannabis sector

more responsive to the needs of society.

The circularity in cause and effect of prohibition tends to escape

both camps. The coffee shopsin their present formin fact challenge

both authoritarian and anti-authoritarian positions. As a regulatory

system for the distribution of cannabis, they are at the core of debatesabout what limits to set on the behavior of citizens, market actors, and

the state. They also Wgure in arguments about what responsibilities to

expect of all these actors. Regulating the cannabis retail trade thus per-

tains also to the questions of how such rights and obligations are to

be determined and enforced, and what mechanisms to put in place to

best organize society. This is no sinecure, since it touches upon strong

vested interests that try to uphold the regulatory monopoly of lawenforcement agencies over the cannabis trade inscribed in national

and international legal regimes, which tend to be rather impervious

to all alternative societal mechanisms of dispute settlement and social

control. Such vested interests in neutralizing democratic decision-

making, accountability, and citizen participation may well also be cher-

ished by corporate actors in the cannabis trade that feel they fare better

by not paying taxes and evading social responsibilities. In sum, as the

coffee shops challenge vested interests and ideologies of global reach,they are also at the center of localized clashes over values, norms, and

interests that seek to deWne citizenship and to determine the limits of

freedom of market forces as well as the remit of coercive state powers.

For a long time, the coffee shop system seemed to exemplify the

pragmatic Dutch approach to illicit drugs. Generally known asgedogen,

this policy assigned a very low priority to the enforcement of pro-

hibitionist drug laws, at least toward some segments of the drug mar-

ket, and rather put emphasis on state practices that would diminish

public disturbances and beneWt the health of drug users. In practice,

this amounted to little more than the non-enforcement of drug laws,

as far as cannabis was concerned. Only in the last decade has the can-

nabis distribution sector been made subject to extensive regulation.

REGULATION IN SPITE OF PROHIBITION 131


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This article describes the various stages of regulation that the can-

nabis retail trade underwent in the Netherlands and, more speciWcally,

the arrangements that have been created to this end in the capital ofAmsterdam. This development is analyzed here as a process of inter-

action between the cannabis sector and an ever-widening array of

governmental, semi-governmental, community, and private control

mechanisms and institutions, sustained and empowered by the inter-

ests and opinions of wider society. In the process, drug entrepreneurs

incrementally exchanged their autonomy for state protection. On the

basis of this, governmental, market, and civic actors could further

turn a basic drug protection racket into a more sophisticated systemof governance that allowed ever more social interests to be taken into

account.2

Yet none of this has been solely the product of governmental plan-

ning, negotiation, and political struggles. The coffee shop system and

its development over time spring from both local and global move-

ments and pressures, ideas and capacities. Whatever the Dutch man-

age and try to hammer out in thisW

eld is subject to changingX

ows ofcommodities, people, and technologies, as well as political and cul-

tural changes that they cannot control and that may either work to

sustain the coffee shop system, have other countries adopt similar ap-

proaches, force adaptations, or spell its demise. Toward the end of

this article, I reXect on how the localized forces that work on the cof-

fee shop system would allow for the transmissibility of its example to

other cultures and polities, as well as on how such localized forces may

endanger the survival of this rather idiosyncratic regulatory systemfor the retail trade of a drug.

CANNABIZ

The rise of substantial cannabis markets in Amsterdam dates back to

the 1970s. As the use of cannabis spread, initially, an anarchical system

developed of semi-open drug markets. In these, cannabis was offered

for sale to visitors and passersby in the street, in parks, and at parties.

In order to control this kind of activity, local authorities in Amster-

damas in some other citiesdecided to concentrate cannabis mar-

kets and thereby separate them from everyday public life. They did



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this by instituting informal licences forso-calledhouse dealers.

A blind eye was turned to the sale of hashish and marijuana by ambu-

lant salesmen or from behind a counter in cultural and youth centers.Similar sales practices were also instituted in some bars.

In line with these societal developments, the national govern-

ment was quick to endorse the practice and decided not to prosecute

its citizens for the use and possession of small amounts of forbidden

drugs. This required some minor changes to the Opium Law that were

made in 1976. The most important of these changes was that posses-

sion of less than thirty grams of cannabis or hash would be consid-

ered a misdemeanor and not a felony. Cannabis-related offences werenevertheless kept on the statute books. In order to reconcile this prac-

tice with prohibitionist laws, recourse was made to a legal instru-

ment, known as the opportuniteitsbeginsel or expediency principle, that

allowed the prosecutors ofWce to assign a very low priority to the

enforcement of laws prohibiting the use and sale of cannabis prod-

ucts.3 With this move,gedogenbecame formal policy. At the time, the

government thought this would be a temporary measure, anticipat-ing that international laws would soon change and enable proper leg-

islation (Bunt 2006). Their main concern was the protection of youth

against penal sanctions and the need to separate cannabis markets,

for which informal house dealers were implicitly endorsed, from those

of other illicit drugs. In order to implement these legal changes, the

regional prosecutors ofWces issued enforcement guidelines to that

effect. Such guidelines would stipulate goals and conditions for the

operation of informal cannabis outlets. These norms were made evenmore explicit in the guidelines issued by the prosecutors of the High

Courts in 1980. Importantly, within this framework, it was left to local

and regional decision-making platforms to determine how best to

attune the conXicting interests of law enforcement, public order, and

public health in their local area.

From the beginning of the 1970s, some houses in Amsterdam could

be found in which cannabis and hashish were offered for sale and

which customers could freely enter. Some of these developed into cof-

fee shops, of which an increasing number started to appear as part of

the street scene. Seldom were steps taken against these outlets by either

administrative or judicial means, as long as the managers made sure

that no other illegal drugs were sold and that they minimized public



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nuisance (Es 1997). In the second half of the 1980s, the coffee shops

largely took the place of the house dealers. As these outlets specialized

in cannabis productsrather unintentionallya wider separation wasestablished between the sale of cannabis and other expressions of youth

culture. These were the high times ofgedogenor laissez-faireby

which state interventions in drug (especially cannabis) markets have

for long been characterized.4 It is therefore not very clear to what

extent the development of coffee shops was supported by political

decision-making, or was merely the outcome of self-regulatory forces

within cannabis markets. However, the 1980 non-enforcement guide-

lines, which gave signiWcant discretion to municipal governments inthis regard, did precipitate quite an explosive growth in the number

of coffee shops, at least in Amsterdam (Jansen 1994, 170). Yet, as it

turned out, the police, juridical, and administrative branches of gov-

ernment still had neither clear directions nor the enforcement tools to

standardize behavior within the sector. Sometimes, they tried to close

a coffee shop, but if the owner appealed the decision, judges would

often decide in the owners favor because the shop had been toleratedfor so long (Korf and Verbraeck 1993; Silvis 1994).

This market freedom and legal and administrative deWciency, cou-

pled with a growing inXux of drug tourists and the normalization of

cannabis use in the Netherlands, resulted in a proliferation of coffee

shops, which again contributed to the degradation of parts of the sec-

tor. The number of coffee shops in Amsterdam rose to around three

hundred to four hundred in 1990, which resulted in the creation of a

large enough social space for less desirable facets of the toleration toappear markedly.5 These included some violence, but also the mixing of

the markets for cannabis, other illicit substances, and stolen goods. At

that time, citizens, and other enterprises in the most affected neighbor-

hoods of the major cities, increased their resistance against drug-related

activities, and their criticism was more and more directed toward the

coffee shops. The Dutch drug policies came under considerable attack

from foreign countries as well (especially France and Germany).

Over the ten years, between 1985 and 1996, we see, therefore, in-

creasing difWculties in clarifying the boundary between the realms of

gedogen and criminal drug law enforcement. From its initial concern

with consumers, it took the government a long time to see cannabis as

more than a consumption good. For a long time, the Dutch government



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remained detached from the vastly developing cannabis market and

its proWts, as well as from undesirable business practices in the can-

nabis trade. We do nonetheless see, during the same period, a strongemphasis on the Wght against organized crime, coupled with the

police themselves becoming closely involved in the importation of

cannabislargely as a control strategy.

This police involvement, which became publicly evident as a result

of a parliamentary investigative commission set up in 1994, illustrates

how the coffee shop system regulates only the retail end of the cannabis

trade. In contrast to the front-door solutions that have been found

through instituting coffee shops, the back-door stages of the cannabisbusiness still largely escape formal controls. In June 2000, the Dutch

parliament voted in favor of the legal regulation of the production

and supply of cannabis to the coffee shops. The government, how-

ever, vetoed this proposal with reference to international treaties that

supposedly would not allow such a change in policies (Cramb 2000).

Even though the Dutch parliament has repeated its request, cannabis

regulation in the Netherlands remains an effort of two minds. Prohibi-tion, in fact, makes policy makers and the public at large face a catch-

22 situation, as choosing between enforcement and non-enforcement

of drug laws often leaves them unable to decide between alternative

courses of action as they appear equally attractive or, rather, distaste-

ful.6 Although drug users and retailers are rarely prosecuted for using

or selling drugs, the production, import, and wholesale trade of canna-

bis, as well as the trade in other illicit drugs, largely escape govern-

mental regulation. Beyond the cannabis retail trade, law enforcementand public safety efforts remain largely at cross-purposes.

REGULATION IN SPITE OF PROHIBITION

In the middle of the 1990s, a new government came to power in The

Hague that seemed to favor legalization, at the time that bothgedogen

and the demand for repression of drug problems had lost much of their

allure. Although these two alternatives seemed to exclude one another,

the more recent history of the coffee shops shows that these strategies

must in fact operate in tandem. This turn away fromgedogen and the

subsequent sanitization of the coffee shops through regulation has



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been a complex process, involving multiple players and having wider

parallels in Dutch society. As mentioned above, the implementation

and enforcement of national drug guidelines were delegated to locallevels of government. Through triangular consultations between re-

gional prosecutors, mayors ofWces, and chiefs of police, each munic-

ipality was able to set its own priorities for drug law enforcement.

This led to a wide diversity of control regimes for cannabis. Many

municipalities, for instance, decided to have no formal coffee shops at

all within their jurisdiction. For those that allowed such outlets, reg-

ulatory arrangements and conditions came to diverge substantially.

The drafting and amendment of national guidelines for the coffeeshops, however, was not simply a top-down process, since it took place

in the context of municipalities expressing their needs to the national

government, seeking more measured administrative, legal, and police

powers and responsibilities. In 1996, the so-called AHOJ-G criteria

were instituted, which built upon national guidelines issued in 1976.

These set concrete limits to the freedom of operation of coffee shops:

no advertising (AfWchering); no hard drugs (cocaine, heroin); no publicdisturbances (Overlast); no admittance to youngsters (Jongeren) under

eighteen; and no sale of quantities over Wve grams (Grote hoeveelhe-

den). Furthermore, a maximum ofWve hundred grams was set for the

stock that was allowed to be held within the perimeter of the coffee

shops and the combination of alcohol and cannabis sales was declared

undesirable. Crucial, however, were the instruments that were created

with which to enforce these regulations.

Again, the dynamic of change in this regard is complex and mul-tilevel. National legislation allowing municipalities to act against

houses in which drugs were sold was passed in 1997, and, in 1999, the

so-called Damocles Law gave local governments the power to close

coffee shops that did not comply with their policies. But local initia-

tives to bring the cannabis sector under control had started far earlier.

In 1992, the Horeca Interventie Team (HIT) was established in Amster-

dam to enforce regulations in the catering industry, including the

coffee shops. This came about by agreement between the chief of police

of the Amsterdam region, the head of the regional tax ofWce, and the

head of the regional customs organization. They were given the task

of enforcing national and local regulations relating to coffee shops, as

well as to make the sector subject to all other regulations pertaining



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to comparable businesses in the catering industry. Under the protec-

tive wings of this enforcement institution, evermore governmental

and semi-governmental control institutions and implementing orga-nizations could also start to bring the coffee shops under their sway.

The regional tax ofWce, for instance, slowly started to develop a

methodology by which coffee shop owners were obliged to set up an

administration system, on the basis of which they could start to pay

taxes. Many other control agencies now started to take an interest in

the coffee shops, as well. The labor inspectorate came to check the

contracts of employees, their insurance position, and the payment of

health care and social fees for personnel working in the shops. So didthe environmental inspectorate, the building and housing inspection

department, the weights and measures ofWce, and the Wre brigade.

And sometimes, even the food inspection department could gain in-

Xuence over the operation of the coffee shops. Thus, the regulatory

monopoly of the police was broken, and broader goals, as well as more

calibrated mechanisms for the enforcement of normative drug, labor,

and business laws, were conceived and established for the cannabissector. This also required the development of administrative instru-

ments and procedures through which the rights and obligations of both

the sector and its regulators could be determined.7

These changes to the governance of the cannabis sector are partly

attributable to support found within the sector itself. Be it by design

or by default, this regulatory framework has facilitated an interaction

between the administration and drug entrepreneurs, in which the

cannabis sector was offered a certain degree of legal protection inexchange for socially desirable behavior. Whether under the auspices

of the Bond van Cannabis Detaillisten (BCD), the association of can-

nabis retailers, or at the level of the individual retailers, coffee shop

owners and administrators have been progressively pulled into the

policy game, despite their unhappiness with frequent raids and strin-

gent controls. One reason for this collaboration at the front door is

the insecurity generated by the fact that the (formally) unregulated

trajectory of the back door brought cannabis retailers in contact

with criminal elements that continued to be seen to not qualify for the

gedogen strategy. Until now, a system has failed to distinguish in a

coherent way legitimate cannabis retailers from a more shadowy

world of illicit drug production and international trafWcking.



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The ever-wider incorporation of control agencies and other social

institutions into the regulatory web in which the coffee shops now

Wnd themselves enmeshed attests to the emergence of a decentralized

system of rule that has afWnities to what Michel Foucault (1991) has

described as governmentality. Not only does the sovereign state be-

come one actor among many but also the cannabis sector engages in

a good deal of self-regulation. These front door coffee shop dynam-

ics, however, cannot be understood in separation from the situation at

the back door, where the continued illegality of cannabis engages the

state to act in preventative, coercive, and complicit ways that connect it

and its agencies to global regimes of drug control in which sovereignstate actors pit themselves against dispersed transnational networks.

As a result of the measures described above, a good part of the

Amsterdam cannabis sector has been sanitized in recent years. The

number of coffee shops has declined dramatically (280 currently), and

the city has attempted to work against the overconcentration of these

shops in the city center. While there remains a variety of styles and

atmospheres in the coffee shops, there has, in some cases, also been acertain tendency to massiWcation and standardization. The best ex-

ample of this is The Bulldog, one of the oldest coffee shops, which has

now established a chain of establishments across Amsterdam. Not only

has The Bulldog branched out to set up other coffee shops and kinds

of businesses in the city, including budget hotels and tourist bike ren-

tals. It has also set itself up as a global brand, opening cafs and bars

in other European cities, a holiday resort in British Columbia, and an

online store; it sells clothing and smoking equipment and even mar-kets an energy drink. With this expansion, the sale of cannabis becomes

a commercial venture like any other. While the ethos of the company

suggests coolness and rebellion, the ritual of consuming the drug re-

duces resistance to the kind of fetish, which, as Michael Taussig (1989)

reminds us, is a property of all commodities.

RUNNING THE COFFEE SHOP

Many of our respondentsespecially those with a shop in areas des-

ignated as overconcentration zones and those with a combined alco-

hol/cannabis licenseindicate unease with meticulous enforcement



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that seems more aimed at their elimination than at norm setting. How-

ever, generally, the coffee shop owners we spoke with appreciate the

norms and regulations put in place. Certainly, the introduction of thesestandards has improved the image of the sector and streamlined the

process of competition, which now plays itself out on the basis of

prices, quality, service, and atmospherejust like any other legiti-

mate market sector. Many of the coffee shops have invested in turn-

ing their shops into establishments with a particular touch by which

they try to distinguish themselves and attract a speciWc clientele. Shops

in the city center can often rely on what they assume to be less criti-

cal tastes of tourists or their nature as captive transient customers.Others, with a more stable clientele, sometimes have access to excep-

tional types of cannabis or hashish. In general, few can assure a con-

tinuous supply of the same type or quality; the remainder adapt the

denomination of available supply to the names on their menu.

Quality control takes place as a mixture of expertise, trust in sup-

pliers, and trial. Retailers all depend on a number of friends, acquain-

tances, wandering salesmen, or specialized wholesale ofW

ces (thekantoortjes). Some (allegedly) have their own plantations. All such

transactions are in cash and depend on relations of trust. They are

therefore delicate and valuable. Some owners simply do not have the

right contacts, have difWculties in supplying their shops, and often

are anxious about getting ripped off by intermediary salesmen who

do not deliver on their promises. Several of our participants expressed

a preference for a purchasing agency under the auspices of the munic-

ipality, where they would be able to buy their supplies, for example,on presenting their license. Supply problems are also related to the

Wve-hundred-gram maximum they can have in store. Although some

see this as a great improvement compared to the previous thirty-gram

norm, economics of scale and turnover require some to have greater

supplies at hand. Many now rent tax-deductible safe-houses, where

they store their stashes and often cut and weigh their goods.

The similarity of coffee shop economics to more familiar small

economic ventures is striking. For their daily cash Xow and adminis-

tration, coffee shops rely on legitimate banks and accountants. Even

though some Wnancial institutions restrict the access of coffee shop

owners to insurances, loans, and mortgages, lawyers are available

where owners have a dispute with tax or municipal agencies. The



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biggest worries and most of the work that coffee shop owners seem

to Wnd come from managing their clientele. In general, owners seem to

prefer to appeal to the less rough segments of the market. Customerscarrying drugs and weapons expose an establishment to the risk of

government sanctions, and therefore owners take great pains to select

and attract the type of clientele they wish.

As for customer service and responsibilities to the wider com-

munity, several respondents advise their clientele on what to expect

from each product. Some even have leaXets in their shops introducing

prospective users to how best to use or not use their products. Some

owners express concern about not really knowing what they sell andhow noxious it may be to their customers health. They generally have

little control over how their products are grown or with what sub-

stances they are mixed or sprayed. Since any nuisance in the street

isrightly or notoften related to their shops, some make the effort

to discipline customers and youngsters smoking in the street, park-

ing illegally, or causing other problems. Throughout the sector, there

is muchW

nger-pointing, as many owners suspect that some segmentsof the market receive unwarranted attention from control agencies,

whereas other segments are treated with impunity.8

TRANSMISSIBILITY AND SURVIVABILITY OF THE

COFFEE SHOP SYSTEM

Consumers in countries such as France, the UK, and Germany con-sume at least as much cannabis products as the Dutch. They are also

becoming increasingly skilled in growing their own. Compared to the

Netherlands, more discrete solutions are generally found to facilitate

the retail trade of cannabis and its consumption elsewhere. There is

no lack of availability of cannabis at home, though connoisseurs may

not be able to purchase the variety offered in the Netherlands. Price,

choice, and convenience, as well as the symbolic social meaning of the

coffee shops, yet remain attractive features of the Dutch coffee shops.

It is this enchantment of the forbidden fruit served openly that keeps

drawing drug tourists in droves. It can thus be argued that the Dutch,

by having formally reined the punitive powers of their state in the

1970s, faced such an overXow of customers for cannabis products from



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abroad that they simply had to regulate the cannabiz, where other

countries only continued to absorb the trade in informal distribution

networks.What explains the coming into being and survival of this system?

Some cultural explanations, for example, that of Justus Uitermark

(2004), identify historically rooted Dutch practices of cautious policing

and enforcement, the existence of a relatively powerful youth move-

ment, supported by inXuential political pressure groups and facilitated

by a culture and tradition of paciWcation amongst the political elites.

However, it could be argued that in the Netherlands the coffee shops

are the exception rather than the rule when it comes to drug control.A large part of the criminal justice system in the country keeps itself

busy cleaning up the consequences of prohibition, leaving it to society

to foot the bill, to deal with the social costs of drug law enforcement,

as well as to accept the increasing costs for private policing. The way

the Dutch drug control system functions toward the back door of

the coffee shops, as much as its approach toward the production and

trade of cocaine, designer drugs, and opiates is hardly any differentfrom other countries in Europe. In all these cases, there are no formal

regulations as to who can do what, where, when, and under what

conditions. Deprivation and punishment by legal sanctions and by

leaving producers, traders, and consumers to fend for themselves in

unregulated markets is also the rule in the Netherlands when it comes

to drug control. Only with these core parameters established is there an

attempt to soften the impact and harm of drugs and drug enforcement

by providing medical/psychological treatment, promoting safer modesof administering drugs, substituting medicine for illegal drugsas

in methadone programsand keeping prison sentences short.

The coffee shop system is very much the outcome of a peculiar

historical conjuncture and ultimately depends on a strong civic move-

ment willing to protect (middle-class) youth from the police. Trans-

mission of the example to other countries probably will depend on

very different constellations of social forces. On a small scale, similar,

more or less formal initiatives are being tried in Western countries

such as Canada, Switzerland, and the UK; yet generally without either

clear indications as to the regulatory tasks and enforcement powers

of government institutions or well-deWned business responsibilities.

Merely tolerated consumption settings and retail outlets appear



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more plentiful throughout the world. Yet often they have to choose

between coping with the police monopoly on levying taxes, pro-

viding protection, and the arbitrary meting out of punishments, orfalling under the sway of some other group able to perform these reg-

ulatory tasks. Transmissibility of the coffee shop system to other coun-

tries thus depends both on the strength of civil society institutions to

rein in state and market forces and on the power of the beneWciaries

of such protection rackets to block reform. Quite a few other actors

also have a stake in obstructing reforms, one pertinent reason being

that they want to have a stick with which to beat the (not-so-middle-

class) youth.Rather than the transmissibility and expansion of coffee shop

arrangements around the world, the question of their survivability

seems to be on the agenda nowadays. Within the Netherlands, the

coffee shops are under continuous pressures that threaten their mode

of operations, if not their survival. New regulations are produced every

year that limit their options. After a failed lobbying campaign to obtain

lenience from the national government in March 2007, the Amster-dam city council decided to force the wet coffee shops to choose be-

tween selling alcohol or cannabiscombined sales would no longer

be tolerated. Forty out of forty-four shops concerned have indicated

that they will continue activities as a cannabis-selling shop rather

than as a bar (Parool, 30/03/07). In February of the same year, the

national government decided that coffee shops considered too close

to schools should be closedeliminating half the coffee shops in Rot-

terdam. Plans to altogether eliminate smoking from cafs and otherpublic places has so far largely sidestepped the coffee shops, but only

after a majority of the Dutch parliament came to their rescue.

Yet the real threats to the coffee shop system come from the very

contradictions that cannot be resolved under the present conditions

of regulation in spite of prohibition. Amongst these is the lack of

formal controls over the quality of cannabis products sold, which

makes the system susceptible to allegations of selling far too power-

ful substances containing elevated levels of THC. Furthermore, under

present regulations, youth under eighteen are not allowed to enter

coffee shops, leaving the most vulnerable (and possibly the most en-

thusiastic) consumer group outside of the relative protection provided

by the system. No normative regulations have been formulated for



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the production and wholesale trading in cannabis, leaving coffee shops

exposed to suppliers that operate under lawless conditions. Recent

research has also found that quite a high percentage of coffee shopowners have criminal records (Bieleman and Snippe 2006).

Many such contradictions ultimately go back to discrepancies be-

tween the legal and enforcement framework put in place by various

levels of government in the Netherlands and the international treaties,

which severely limit the legislative and regulatory powers and capac-

ities of states, entrepreneurs, and citizens in this Weld and effectively

make regulation a police monopoly. Furthermore, these international

treaties are supported by international actors and subject to contin-uous revisions that invariably tighten the discretionary power of

governments to deWne their own policies, increase the punitive and

investigative powers of criminal justice systems against citizens who

do drugs, and add new categories of crime to the list of drug offences

with which sanctions can be imposed (such as money laundering

and participation in an organized crime group).

In the case of the Netherlands, other such external forces are thepolitical pressure of its neighboring countriesnowadays, most of all

concerned with drug tourism and, importantly, the process of Euro-

pean integration. The various drives that spring from that latter pro-

cess demand further legal harmonization as well as police and justice

cooperation. A major issue in negotiations is whether the Netherlands

will be able to deviate much longer in its persecution and sentencing

policies.

CONCLUSION

Many governmentsfor the greater part, rightly sohave become

convinced that they can better protect their population by not enforc-

ing prohibitionist laws. However, both the enforcement and the under-

enforcement of present drug laws leave a whole economic sector

unchecked by the normative workings of legal codes. Under such con-

ditions, societies are not only deprived of their power to regulate the

drug industry but also divested of the means to improve governance

in this Weld. Under prohibition, illicit drug markets and their control

through the criminal justice system tend to combine the worst of two



17/20

modes of social ordering: free (economic) markets and coercive (polit-

ical) control.

By contrast, the Dutch coffee shop system for cannabis distribu-tion offers a rather unique perspective on the possibilities of regula-

tion and standardization of an economic sector that is formally placed

outside the law. This example merits particular attention since the

Dutch cannabis distribution system has, over the last decade, become

subject to some quite dramatic regulatory changes. These changes are,

however, hardly ever perceivedat least, not by foreign observers

as their goals tend to fall outside the reference points of general drug

policies and their results deWnitely lie beyond the capacity of com-mon drug law enforcement.

The present-day coffee shop systemas it has been hammered out

in Amsterdamdemonstrates that societies and governments poten-

tially have much more reWned tools to protect their citizenry. Insti-

tuting such policy instruments toward the control of the drug trade

would certainly enable societies to push the level of ambition of drug

policies upwards. That is, relations between states, markets, and soci-eties canin the drug trade as in other economic areasbe organized

in such a way as to be rooted in social contracts between rulers and

the ruled. The use of more reWned policy tools could even be more

effective in bringing about the traditionallimitedgoals of drug

policies. In essence, this article wants to argue that the discussion

between proponents of decriminalization and prohibition is based on

a false contradiction. Gedogen, no more than repression, can offer a

way out of the deWciency in norm setting, regulation, enforcement, andconsent that continues to thrive under such systems of relative law-

lessness.9 The halfway regulatory effort instituted in the coffee shops

in the Netherlands may be less a consequence of a divergent political

culture than the unintended consequence of migrating demand. It

does, in the eyes of many Dutch citizens, attest to a brave struggle to

rein in arbitrary state powers and unregulated market forces. Yet we

all know it is not enough. Real legalization would be just the start of

a long, drawn-out process of discussion, negotiation, norm setting,

and enforcement of rulesas normally ensues with any other new

commodity entering the market. Coffee shops are far from a certain

outcome of such developments. One of the coffee shop owners in our

survey expressed the expectation that the demand for cannabis would



18/20

collapse altogether were the product to become legal. But this is by no

means a universal expectation; big tobacco companies are known to

be prepared to enter this market once the opportunity arises.

Notes

1. The author was involved in a pilot study into the cannabis distribution

system in Amsterdam, conducted under the auspices of the Centre for Drug Re-

search (CEDRO) in 2002.

2. Charles Tilly (1985) applies the concept of protection rackets to the enter-prise of rule or governance itself. It plays a crucial role in his account of the Euro-

pean state-building process, together with the extraction of resources and warfare.

Tilly deWnes a protection racket as a situation where a ruler furnishes both the

threat and protection against the threat (171). Although the essence of the process

of establishing authority and rule over populations and their activities may lie in

providing with one hand what is taken with the other, my assertion is that the

process of mutually beneWcial exchanges that ideally result from such norm-

setting exchange practices is fundamentally Xawed by prohibition. Indeed, pro-

hibition is well understood as a protection racket by which the state is largelyresponsible for producing the problems against which it claims to protect society,

to be sure, at a price. See van der Veen (2002, 2003) for a discussion of how this

concept Wts disparate state practices toward the drug trade.

3. The expediency principle can be contrasted with the legality principle

prevalent in some other countries legal systems. The latter obliges law enforcers

to act against all transgressions of the law. For a precise overview of the legal and

political developments surrounding Dutch drug policies up to the 1990s, see the

various contributions in Leuw and Haen-Marshall (1994).

4. Some authors indicate the Wrst stage of regulation described below as theera of laissez faire, as opposed to the later period where formal norms were

actually set for the coffee shop sector and which they identify as the era ofgedo-

gen. Generally,gedogen yet refers to the fact that prohibitionist laws were largely

ignored in the retail trade (which was the case over the whole period described).

The important point is that, incrementally, a broader set of normative regulations

were actually deWned and enforced.

5. The number of coffee shops can be compared to 193 specialized retail out-

lets for tobacco registered in the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce in April 2002,

94 shops for alcoholic beverages, 1,048 bars, and 229 specialized shops for meat

products.

6. In reality, the import/export and wholesale trade in illicit drugs may also

be subject to a type of indirect rule by the criminal justice system. At least, the

extensive use of investigative police methods, powers, and resources dedicated to

these market sectors could be expected to have some beneWts to society at large.



19/20

These should, at a minimum, offer the possibility of imposing some checks and

balances, as well as self-restraint, on the illicit drug sector. However, how such a

system works or could work hasto my knowledgenot yet been thoroughly

investigated.

7. To this end, the city of Amsterdam resorted to or created a number of

arrangements, including a formally endorsed municipal coffee shop policy docu-

ment; an administrative exploitation licence that the owners of coffee shops can

obtain, as well as forfeit, under carefully formulated conditions; a closure policy

that allows for the reduction or relocation of coffee shops; the HIT as well as the

local sub-units of the city police being made responsible for the enforcement of

the AHOJ-G criteria; the institution of a stappenplana gradual increase in penal-

tiesand development of a sanction system through which transgression of these

norms can be punished; the so-called coffee shop list that enables the adminis-

tration of exploitation rights of coffee shops. With this system, an obligation is

created on coffee shop owners to renew their licence; the Damocles Law, which

delegates law enforcement powers to the municipality, has proven especially use-

ful for closing retail outlets without a license, and also makes it easier to impose

extra local conditions on coffee shop operations. To facilitate a quick and thor-

ough check on a coffee shops operation, the municipality is about to produce a

barcode book that stipulates and organizes all the various documents a man-

ager of a coffee shop has to show at any time, when he is subject to an inspection.8. A member of the HIT indicated that this suspicion may not be completely

groundlessat least, as far as tax collection was concernedsince shops run by

immigrants, their capital Xows, as well as the whereabouts of those holding own-

ership titles, were generally more difWcult to track and control, and thus inXu-

enced efWciency decisions of controllers.

9. Having said this, it must also be acknowledged that cannabis distribution

in Amsterdam, even under conditions of laissez faire, was not associated with

widespread state or nonstate violence. This relative peace may attest, Wrst of all,

to the self-regulating capacity of cannabis markets. In general, the occurrence ofstate and nonstate violence is still uncommon in the Netherlands as a way to

resolve issues resulting from social, political, and economic conXict and cleavage.

This is not to deny that, since the middle of the 1990s, many of the larger players

in Dutch hash imports have met an untimely and violent death. So far, hardly any

of these murders have been solved.

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beleid?Justitile Verkenningen 32, no. 1: 1023.

Cramb, Gordon. 2000. Dutch Cannabis Vote Irks Cabinet.Financial Times. June 28.



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Es, van, Kurt. 1997. De Coffeeshop: De Opmerkelijke Geschiedenis van een Hollands

Fenomeen. Amsterdam: Jan Mets.

Foucault, Michel. 1991. Governmentality. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Govern-

mentality. Ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. 87104.

Jansen, Ad C. M. 1994. The Development of a Legal Consumers Market for

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Taussig, Michael. 1989. History as Commodity: In Some Recent American (Anthro-

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Vander Veen -Regulation in Spite of Prohibition in Amsterdam - 2009