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Amsterdam Excluded From Netherlands’s Legal Cannabis Experiment
(www.forbes.com)
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I’ve never understood these half legalization laws. “Legal” consumption, illegal production. The same thing with prostitution laws were it’s legal to sell sex, but illegal to buy it.
Whatever.
With prostitution, it makes sense (if you want to criminalize it at all).
You don't want to criminalize people who are often pressured into prostitution, because that would cut them off from getting help or going to the police if they are abused.
With weed, what the Dutch model tries to achieve is to not punish people for smoking weed, but also not turn it into a for-profit industry that would create an incentive to get more people addicted.
I think the German model is better in this regard: Let supply also be legal, but non-commercial. But they went overboard with the regulations (police can get a list of all consumers at any time, without a court order or criminal suspicion). And it looks like the decriminalization will fail at the last minute anyway.
It's more that there's a lot of conservative parties that do not agree on the drug policy. E.g. enough Christian parties who would rather be more restrictive.
Alcohol producers are probably lobbying against it too.
This is the reason that legalization in Belgium isn't even remotely on the table. AB Inbev practically writes the law here.
I regularly have to work with them. They are worse than Hitler. Fuck ABI.
AFAIK the Dutch model so far (consumption and sale somewhat allowed, but no growing or importing) has created huge criminal organisations that also started to do a lot of other crimes (bc what’s there to lose if you’re going to jail anyway basically) and a big goal in designing the new German law was to not mess it up like the Netherlands have
Dutch authorities started cracking down on small-time growers, which opened the (black) market up to large criminal organizations.
Its so the people who dont have any other choice, are addicted or forced to prostitute themselves arent punished. The people abusing all these things can be punished.
A lot of it has to do with the way Cannabis is treated at the EU-level. Some countries are trying to legalize it in a way that doesn't conflict with existing regulations. That is also why it took Germany so long to approve their new legalization bill.
Conservative fuckfaces are trying to torpedo it. I fucking hate those people. Everything has turned to shit in the last couple of years. At least give me some weed .
It's to avoid criminalising the victims. A prostitute is in a bad financial situation. A customer exploits that: "don't want to starve? Suck this dick bitch!"
It also shifts the power dynamic. If prostitution would be illegal the customer could use this to (further) exploit the person prostituting beyond the financial pressure.
It's called compromise - kind of base of this whole democraticy thing we have going.
Oh what a great 'compromise', "you can take a bite of this cake but if you swallow I will punch you in the face". This has nothing to do with democracy, democracy means you do what the majority of people want, not a half-assed, kinda-doing-it-but-also-kinda-not thing.
Konservatives want all drugs illegal and progressives want a more sensible approach - to keep peace in society democracy is able to find a compromise between those groups. After some time when acceptance rises, the compromise can be negotiated.