You just will not be able to mix any tobacco with your cannabis. That is because the new Dutch ban on smoking tobacco in bars affects even that most Dutch of institutions: the “coffee shop” that legally serves cannabis.

Pot is still permitted but cigarettes are out.

Rather, it is a nanny state, with a quirky nanny. The Dutch nanny lets you smoke dope and visit prostitutes and have teenage sex (homosexual if you prefer) as long as you do it while she stands over you wearing antiseptic gloves. Then, when you are finished, she will tax you for it.

The country’s rule-bound Shangri La was best captured in the film Pulp Fiction, which is no wonder because Quentin Tarantino wrote parts of the script in an Amsterdam coffee shop. In one scene, Samuel L. Jackson’s character asks the John Travolta character, who has just returned from Amsterdam: “Okay now, tell me about the hash bars?”

Travolta embarks on a typically Dutch legalistic discourse: “It breaks down like this: it’s legal to buy it, it’s legal to own it and, if you’re the proprietor of a hash bar, it’s legal to sell it. It’s legal to carry it, which doesn’t really matter ’cause – get a load of this – if the cops stop you, it’s illegal for them to search you.”

Of course, the moment nanny lets you do something it stops being fun. That is why the Dutch rarely bother doing all the hedonistic things foreigners fantasise about. The country has one of the world’s lowest rates of teenage pregnancy, about a fifth of the British level; far fewer deaths from drugs overdoses than even Denmark or Norway; and less cannabis use than the UK or US.

Amsterdam’s coffee shops, with their endless regulations and their clientèle of 18-year-old Germans, are among the least transgressive places on earth. The city’s “cafés”, which serve only coffee and alcohol, are much more glamorous than the coffee shops and more erotic than the city’s sad red-light district. But every Amsterdammer who has ever taken foreign friends around town knows that that is a hard message to convey.

The ban on tobacco proves yet again that nanny knows best. Each year several thousand Dutch people die of passive smoking, according to the country’s health council, whereas the estimated number of annual Dutch cannabis deaths is zero. Even the Dutch Bond van Cannabis Detaillisten (wonderfully, the Union of Cannabis Retailers), though it is sulking about the tobacco ban, admits: “Really it’s madness to mix expensive cannabis with tobacco.” Yet it suspects some customers will continue to transgress with nicotine. As the Bond’s spokesman gloated in a Dutch newspaper, with a nod to Travolta: “The inspector does not have the right to inspect your joint.”

http://www.ft.com/

This news article was posted by Canna Zine member 'TomStoner'. Thanks Tom.