The mayor of the Dutch city of Maastricht wants to ban all 16 cannabis cafés in the city centre and set up a ”weed boulevard” to keep drug tourists and criminals out of town, his spokesperson said on Friday.
Maastricht is close to the border with both Belgium and Germany and attracts almost 1,5-million drug tourists yearly, who flock to the so-called coffee shops where cannabis is sold legally. Most come from Germany and France.
Maastricht mayor Gerd Leers wants all coffee shops in the centre to move to one location outside of town to limit the nuisance caused by drug tourism.
Although travellers can buy cannabis in coffee shops legally in The Netherlands, it is illegal to take it back over the border to Germany, Belgium and France.
Marijuana was decriminalised in The Netherlands in 1976 and is sold legally in licensed coffee shops, but cultivating cannabis is illegal.
The south of the Limburg province, where Maastricht is located, has three times the level of drug-related crime as the urban ring in central Netherlands, which includes Amsterdam, The Hague, Rotterdam and Utrecht.
Leers, a Christian Democrat known for his zero-tolerance policies on crime, want legal cannabis cafés moved out of the town centre within five years. The plan is to move the coffee shops south, the direction were most of the drugs tourists come from, his spokesperson said. — Sapa-AFP