People Ban: Holland Cigarettes no, drugs no

Finance ministry breaks WHO treaty
24 July 2013
The finance ministry is breaking a World Health Organisation treaty on the discouragement of smoking, weekly magazine Vrij Nederland reports.
The treaty states that governments drawing up new laws to discourage smoking must have no contact with companies with a commercial interest in tobacco.
According to documents obtained by Vrij Nederland under freedom of information laws, the finance ministry is prepared to alter legal text at the behest of the tobacco industry.
Statement
In a statement, the ministry told news agency ANP it ‘keeps to the treaty’ and does not discuss new laws on health policy with tobacco firms. Where discussions do take place, these are about how to levy taxes and not about how high the tax should be.
‘The amount of tax on tobacco in the Netherlands, one of the highest in Europe, shows the industry has no say in the matter,’ a spokesman told the magazine.
Employers
Vrij Nederland also reports that employers’ organisation VNO-NCW lobbies at the highest government levels in The Hague and in Brussels to soften the anti-smoking policy. VNO-NCW director Niek van Kesteren told the magazine the Netherlands government needs tobacco taxes to balance its budget.

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Dutch cannabis smoker fined – for using tobacco
A man was fined by the Dutch police for smoking a cannabis joint but only because it was mixed with tobacco.

By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels
24 Sep 2008

While the Netherlands has kept its liberal policy on the smoking of cannabis in the country’s legendary “coffee shops”, zero tolerance is now shown to tobacco smokers in Dutch cafes and restaurants after a smoking came ban came into force last July.

An Amsterdam police spokesman admitted that it could be difficult to understand the current Dutch policy of allowing smokers to puff away on pure cannabis while fining tobacco users.

“For logic it is sometimes impossible to explain, even to the Dutch,” he said.

“The man was not fined for smoking a cannabis joint but for smoking. You can smoke cannabis but not tobacco in coffee shops.”

The unnamed 27-year-old man owns one of the city’s coffee shops, where the purchase and smoking of cannabis is tolerated, and he is expected to contest the case in court.

It will be the first test of a Dutch smoking ban that exempts people from enjoying joints as long as only pure marijuana is used.

The man was caught lighting a hand rolled cannabis joint during a routine police check and fined because officers found tobacco mixed with the soft drug.

The smoking ban is usually enforced by municipal health and safety inspectors “but if a police officer signals an infringement, he does not close his eyes to it,” said the police spokesman.

A fifth of Dutch cafes and bars are ignoring the tobacco smoking ban, which was introduced on July 1. Many are setting up special funds to collect money to pay fines issued to smokers.

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Dutch pub owners rebel against smoking law
Oct 9, 2008

THE HAGUE (AFP) — Dutch pub owners have launched a coordinated resistance against a smoking ban introduced in June, taking their ashtrays out of short-lived storage and pooling cash to pay the resultant fines.

Thousands have joined groupings intent on countering the law seen by many as “un-Dutch” and patriarchal; approaching the courts for relief and daring authorities to try and stop their clients from lighting up.

“My clients are all regulars. They come here to play cards and dice. Ninety-five percent of them smoke, that’s just the way it is,” Jef Broeren, owner of the cafe De Kauw in Tilburg in the south of the country, told AFP.

Less than a week after the ban came into effect, Broeren brought the ashtrays out again after initially trying to comply.

“Neighbours complained about the smokers on the pavement and I saw my profits dwindling,” he explained.

The Dutch health inspectorate VWA said this week that nearly one in four of the 750 pubs inspected in the past three months did not abide by the law.

There were different degrees of disobedience, it said in a statement. In about 100 pubs there were slight violations, while 75 were deliberately flouting the law.

In this last group, “not a single measure was taken to give effect to the smoking ban”, said the VWA.

Broeren and other defiant pub owners from around the country came up with a plan in September to create a pool of money to pay the fines likely to befall them.

Some 1,500 establishments have so far subscribed for a once-off amount of 50 euros. “The initiative is spreading fast,” said Broeren.

The VWA has inspected more than 6,700 premises since the ban on smoking for the hotel, restaurant and catering (Horeca) industry came into effect on July 1.

Pubs were the least adherent by far. Ninety-five percent of other enterprises, including restaurants, sports bars and hotels, conformed to the law, it found.

The VWA has issued many warnings and about 50 fines, which rise from an initial 300 euros up to 2,400 euros with repeated infringements.

Wiel Maessen of the anti-smoking ban association “Save the small horeca enterprise” told AFP that at least 5,000 pubs countrywide still allowed their clients to smoke.

“The idea is to get all 15,000 small pubs in the country to join our movement. Such a number would be impossible to police without this becoming a police state.”

Health Minister Ab Klink has announced changes to the law so that establishments can be fined on the spot from October 1, without prior warning.

He told parliament this week that the VWA would intensify its inspections, targeting those entities known to be deliberately flouting the law.

But the small horeca association, which has launched a court application for its members to be excluded from the ban, protests that small pubs have already seen their profits drop by between 30 and 50 percent and risked disappearing entirely.

The association claims to represent some 900 establishments that do not have the money or the space to erect a separate smoking area.

“We are not breaking the law because we like to, but because we have no choice,” the body said in a recent statement.

The court application is pending.

www.horecasite.nl, which claims to be the Netherlands’ biggest online retail agency for the horeca industry, said this week that the number of businesses on sale had risen 10 percent since the introduction of the smoking ban.

And the Koninklijke Horeca Nederland, the largest industry association, said the situation was close to “chaos”.

“I sound the alarm for a great many enterprises,” its president, Lodewijk van der Frinten, recently said, complaining about the “disproportionate effects” of the ban on small bars.

The Central Statistical Bureau recently found that the number of smokers in the Netherlands had dropped by nearly 100,000 since 2000, with less than a quarter of Dutch still enjoying a cigarette.

The VWA had no statistics for compliance by coffee shops, which face a unique conundrum under the new law as its patrons are allowed to smoke marijuana as long as it is not blended with tobacco.

The use of “soft” drugs like marijuana is tolerated in the Netherlands.

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Dutch cafes use fake cigarette smells to create atmosphere after smoking ban
By Bruno Waterfield in Amsterdam
14/07/2008
Nasty smells left by sweaty summer beer drinkers have left some Dutch bar owners pining for the aroma of cigarette and cigar smoke two weeks after a smoking ban came into force.
Rain Showtechniek, a Dutch company that specialises in lighting, special stage effects and sound systems, has developed a machine that reproduces the traditional smell of bars and cafes.
“There is a need for a scent to mask the sweat and other unpleasant smells like stale beer,” said Erwin van den Bergh, a spokesman for the company.
“People find that smells such as Mocha coffee, Havana cigars or cigarettes can be about good moods and different ideas of living well.”
Unlike the real thing, the artificial tobacco smells do not have any health risks and does not linger in the hair or clothing of bar customers.
“Geurmachines” come in different sizes and prices, ranging from giant smell-makers, costing ?3500 for exhibition halls to smaller and cheaper scent devices for caf?s, priced at ?440.
Over 50 different scents are offered for the new machines ranging from tobacco aromas to the smell of leather, freshly baked bread or new cars.
The Dutch smoking ban began on July 1.

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Amsterdam coffee shops say tobacco ban is blow to business

By Peter Popham and Vanessa Mock Tuesday, 17 June 2008

The Netherlands’ famous coffee shops, where marijuana is available over the counter, face the threat of extinction when the country goes smoke- free on 1 July.

Smoking dope is the raison d’?tre of the cafes which are scattered across the country, with the greatest and most famous concentration in Amsterdam. But when the tobacco ban comes in, the coffee shops will not be exempt.

This will lead to the paradoxical situation that only pure grass or cannabis resin, which are not covered by the ban, can be legally smoked in the shops.

Anybody rolling a tobacco-based joint will be breaking the law – but only because of the tobacco. “The new rule is nonsense,” said Willem Panders, of the Dutch tobacco traders’ u nion. “It will be almost impossible to enforce because how are you going to check if someone is smoking cannabis mixed with tobacco, or pure cannabis?”

But despite desperate lobbying, owners have failed to get the government to make an exception of them. “Coffee shops will be treated in the same manner as other catering businesses,” the Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkanende, said last week. “It would have been wrong to move towards a smoke-free catering industry and then make an exception for coffee shops. People would not have understood that.”

At any one time up to 1,300 coffee shops are for sale across the country, but the Dutch catering magazine Horeca Vizier reports that the figure has jumped to 1,600 because of the ban.

Marc Jacobsen, of BCD, a national association of coffee-shop owners which has been urging the government to give them special status, told the online version of Der Spiegel: “In a cafe you come to drink something. In a restaurant you come to eat. But when you come to a coffee shop you come to smoke, so smoking has to be allowed in a coffee shop.”

As in the rest of Europe the purpose of the ban is to protect the health of staff, who at present are obliged to inhale passively other people’s smoke. But Sandy Lambrecht, the manager of the Bulldog coffee shop on the Leidseplein in the heart of Amsterdam, said: “The new rules are absurd. You come to a coffee shop to smoke, after all – it’s ridicuulous that we have to comply.
The new rules are meant to protect employees like me, but the point is that we chose to work here.”

Paul Wilhelm, the owner of De Tweede Kamer, one of Amsterdam’s most famous coffee shops, founded in 1985, argued: “If the boys are old enough to be sent to Afghanistan, then you can’t tell me that people want to protect them from smoke in the workplace. They’re old enough to decide on their own. They can vote, they can go to war – but now thhey won’t even be allowed to make this decision?”

Many British pubs re-opened their gardens when the smoking ban took effect, but most Dutch coffee shops are penned into tiny premises with no outdoor space. The solution in Bulldog is to create a separate, walled-off space for those who want to smoke, off-limits to staff.

“We’re now having to build a new section in our coffee-shop with a glass partition and special air filters for those who choose to smoke non-pure cannabis,” said Sandy Lambrecht. “It’s a shame as it will change the very congenial ambience in here – half of our customers will be shuut off behind a glass wall. Our customers will grumble, that’s for sure.”

But the Dutch Health Minister, Ab Klink, is impenitent. “A positive side effect of the smoking ban,” he said, “may be that consumers who spend the whole day hanging out in coffee shops will find other things to do.”

Cannabis cafe culture

Contrary to popular perception, cannabis is – technically –?€“ an illegal substance in the Netherlands. However the country’s pragmatic drug policy has led to a division in the eyes of the law between “hard” drugs, such as cocaine or heroin, and “soft”, like cannabis.

Holland’s policy of non-enforcement towards cannabis consumption and possession goes back to 1976. Originally it applied to a quantity of less than 30 grams, but the amount coffee shops are able to sell to one person is now limited to five grams.

Cannabis cafes haveto stick to strict criteria.
They must be licensed, cannot admit or sell drugs to minors under 18, and the advertisement of drugs is banned. In April 2007, new legislation forced the coffee shops to choose between serving alcohol and cannabis. The vast majority opted to serve cannabis.

Although cannabis is usually mixed with tobacco and smoked in a joint, it can be smoked – without tobacco – in a bong or pipe. It can also be consumed as a tea or in cake form, but the effect of the drug takes much longer to be felt.

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Dutch Reject Coffee Shop Smoking Ban
July 13, 2007
Angus Reid Global Monitor
Most people in the Netherlands would reject a ban on smoking that includes the country’s coffee shops, according to a poll by Maurice de Hond. 61 per cent of respondents think these establishments should be excluded from the proposed law, while 37 per cent disagree.
Dutch voters renewed the Second Chamber—the lower house of parliament—in November 2006. The governing Christian-Democratic Appeal (CDA) of minister president Jan Peter Balkenende secured 41 seats. In February, a coalition encompassing the CDA, the Labour Party (PvdA) of Wouter Bos, and the Christian U nion (CU) of Andre Rouvouet was assembled.
A ban on smoking in the workplace and public transport was introduced in the Netherlands on Jan. 1, 2004. The government recently announced that a smoking ban will come into effect in the hospitality industry in July 2008. Legislators are still discussing whether close to 744 caf?s—where the sale of cannabis for consumption on the premises is officially tolerated—should be included in the ban.
On Jul. 9, the Foundation for Smoker’s Interests launched a national petition to protect coffee shops from the ban. The group said in a statement: “The ban is inconvenient both for caf? patrons who would like to smoke, and caf? owners. Research shows that they will get 15 per cent fewer patrons because of the smoking ban.”
Polling Data
Do you think coffee shops should be excluded from the proposed smoking ban?
Yes?? 61%
No?? 37%
Not sure?? 2%
?Source: Maurice de Hond
Methodology: Interviews with 1,000 Dutch adults, conducted on Jul. 2, 2007. No margin of error was provided.

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Caf? smoking ban next summer (update)
DutchNews.nl – Amsterdam,Netherlands
Health minister Ab Klink is sticking firm to earlier pledges to introduce a total ban on smoking in caf?s, bars and restaurants by July 2008. …

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The Dutch: Cigarettes no, drugs yes
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21 April 2007
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Dutch authorities have rejected the idea that the nationwide smoking ban in restuarants and bars will affect the notorious coffeeshops, saying that marijuana would still be allowed.

In fact, the Dutch may follow their European counterparts in imposing a smoking ban in restaurants, pubs and nightclubs but soft drugs such as cannabis would still be allowed.

“It is ridiculous to think that a smoking ban would be the end of coffee shops,” local conservative politician and coffee shop owner Michael Veling said.

It is ridiculous to think that a smoking ban would be the end of coffee shops.”

Veling says the clientele who have been coming to coffee shops to buy and inhale marijuana are flexible enough to find a way around any ban on smoking the tobacco products they routinely mix with marijuana resin or leaf in rolled paper “joints.”

“You can bring parsley or old socks if you want, cut them here and smoke them, nobody will say anything,” Veling said.

“Plus there are plants that have a every similar structure to tobacco and can maybe substitute for it.”

The Tobacco smoking ban which comes into affect in 2008 is expected to shift smokers from the traditional cigarettes to other similar soft drugs which are not classified as cigarettes in order to escape the ban.