[Trailer for 'Nederwiet', a documentary on the Dutch soft drugs scene of coffeeshops, illegal growers, and the police, that was shown on Dutch television on Monday 25 April 2011]

With the ‘weed-pass’ coming to the southern Dutch provinces on 1 May, another notorious case in the decline of Dutch soft drug tolerance resurfaced last thursday. The long-running saga surrounding the closed coffeshop Checkpoint in Terneuzen took another twist. In a surprising decision considering the current conservative turn in the Netherlands, a court in The Hague has decided that the former owner of Checkpoint, Meddie Willemsen, should be free from prosecution.

The Bureau covered the crazy story of the rise and demise of Checkpoint back in March 2010 (Exit Checkpoint -Exit Dutch Soft Drug Policy?), following the judgement by the Middelburg court that even though the coffeeshop represented a ‘criminal organisation’ neither the owner nor sixteen of his employees should go to jail. Why not? Simply because the booming marijuana business had been fully supported by the local council and police force – it was literally a huge tourist-puller and cash-cow (+/-2500 customers a day) for the otherwise rather dismal town of Terneuzen lying under the shadow of Dow Chemical’s biggest European plant.

The state prosecutor’s office wasn’t satisfied with the outcome and began to plot a case against Willemsen and his employees, despite the obvious message from Middelburg that while this was technically possible it would in reality open a huge can of worms. It looked like Checkpoint was being set up as a scapegoat to send a message to all other coffeshops – If you transgress the law on holding more than 500 grams of marijuana we’ll come down on you hard (Checkpoint had in total 160 kilos when it was raided). And a message to the local councils – don’t get too supportive of the local drugs business. Another nail in the coffin for Dutch soft drug tolerance.

Only they’ve picked the wrong case – as the judges in The Hague have said, this one literally doesn’t stand up in court. The level of cooperation that Willemsen had received from the authorities before the bust had strongly suggested that he was beyond the long arm of the law. The fact that this relationship was reversed without warning has fundamentally undermined the prosecution’s argument.

While the Checkpoint case continues in the background, a much bigger issue that will fundamentally transform the soft drug landscape is fast approaching – the weed-pass or wietpas. The most interesting thing about the pass, which will restrict each coffeeshop to 2000 registered customers living in the immediate area, is that it is being introduced against strong opposition from the municipal authorities in those same southern provinces. A superb review of the coming the law in De Groene Amsterdammer last November made clear that just as there was serious movement for an experimental legalisation of marijuana cultivation in Brabant, Minister of Justice Ivo Opstelten torpedoed it with his plan for a more severe clamp-down. Support for legalisation had come from among others Eindhoven mayor Rob van Gijzel, who saw a rise in violent criminal activity surrounding the illegal drugs business. In these circumstances the idea of weakening the law to deal with criminality was not on Opstelten’s mind. Conservative Netherlands was on the rise.

The stupid thing is, the wietpas is not going to deal with the very problem that the southern provinces want to deal with – the free-wheeling drugs gangs. Coffeeshops are no longer seen as a problem for most of the local authorities across Brabant and Limburg, and they literally fear that the introduction of the wietpas will make criminality increase as much of the trade switches to the streets. Belgians, French and Germans, excluded from the coffeeshops due to the residency restrictions for the pass, will be forced to look elsewhere for their supply. The end result is therefore a law that discriminates against foreigners, will produce more crime, and force any well-meaning Dutch dope-smoker to be registered with the state – becoming a semi-criminal in the process.

Understandably the level of criticism has been high, but the sources of much of the criticism has been very interesting. Next to Rob van Gijzel came Thom de Graaf, former leader of D 66 and now mayor of Nijmegen, who pointed out last December that it is up to the mayors themselves how they interpret the law on coffeeshop tolerance. The Hague can’t tell the mayors what to do, whatever Opstelten thinks. Then there was Hans van Duijn, former chairman of the Netherlandse Politiebond (police union), who argued around the same time that the best way to deal with the drugs-crime link was exactly to open more coffeeshops to squeeze the street trade.

So far, all to no avail. On 15 December Opstelten announced that an immediate introduction of the wietpas was not wise, and Zeeland, Brabant and Limburg now have until 1 May to prepare. The rest of the country will follow on 1 January 2013. No doubt there will be more twists to the story in the months to come.

[Thanks to Boomerang]

Tough week for the AIVD. Every service has to endure the fact that while its successes are hardly ever disclosed to protect the sources, its failures often reach the outside world quite easily. So it was this time. After several reports in the press concerning blunders and questionable work practices at the service, Andre Elissen and Marcial Hernandez of the PVV tabled seven questions to Rutte and Minister of the Interior Ivo Opstelten yesterday. 

The bad news began on Friday 13th (of course), with the news that an AIVD officer had been expelled from their post in Ankara by the Turkish government in 2011. A case of ‘forward defence’ gone wrong. The reasons behind this are unclear and there is an information black-out on the incident from both The Hague and Ankara, but not enough to prevent it from eventually reaching the press. The officer had fulfilled a liaison function with the Turkish service and was tracking muslin extremist groups, among others Hizbollah, which is meant to possess networks in the Netherlands and Germany. They have now been transferred to another embassy in the Middle Eastern. Apparently only around twelve embassies around the world have such an official AIVD liaison position to work with the local services, which indicates how important the position in Turkey was.

Dutch-Turkish relations are not at there best these days. According to Ankara the Netherlands is too easy-going on the PKK, and Dutch financial support for a human rights organisation operating in South-East Turkey was seen as support for the Kurdish cause (as well as the charge that the finance could have found its way to the militants). Another thorn in the bilateral side is the PVV itself. Geert Wilders has not hidden his feelings about the Turkish government of Recep Erdogan and his AK [Justice and Development] party. On 23 December PVV’ers Wilders, Hernandez, and Wim Kortenoeven questioned whether Turkish membership of NATO should be reconsidered due to the unilateral ending of military cooperation with Israel and France earlier in the year, stating that the Turkish government was now “an untrustworthy islamic ally.” Then there is the issue of 380,000 Dutch inhabitants of Turkish origin, a not insignificant fact of Dutch social life. Interesting times for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to celebrate 400 years of Dutch-Turkish diplomatic relations, 1612-2012.

But back to the AIVD. The next report was from Bart Olmer in De Telegraaf  last Saturday and concerned the case of Outman ben Amar, hired by the service to act as an Arabic translator but who in 2007 received four years in prison for leaking information to the ‘Hofstadgroep’ cell. The story painfully illustrates what can happen if a lack of knowledge in a specific sector is too hastily filled. Ben Amar’s application procedure is meant to have included enough suspicious signs – unexplained gaps in his CV, unclear motivation for the job – for the selection committee to give a negative advice to the AIVD. Remarkably these concerns were overruled due to the rapid need for Arabic-speaking personnel. The article was accompanied by another in the Telegraaf that covered the tragic suicide of an AIVD officer five years after the death of Theo van Gogh. This event has apparently caused others in the service to release information to the press about AIVD blunders, among others the den Amar case.

The result of the Telegraaf article(s) was the list of PVV questions, which focused on the trivialities of AIVD routine work (is it true that the staff operating the safes for secret information knock off at 4pm?) and whether the service possessed a sufficient ‘whistle-blower’ mechanism to deal with discontent lower down the ranks.  The PVV to the rescue of a disillusioned service? More like a classic move by the Wilders’ gang – blame the elites for being lax and undermining national security as a result.