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Amsterdam Excluded From Netherlands’s Legal Cannabis Experiment
(www.forbes.com)
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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.