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7/30/2019 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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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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