Dutch government fails at allowing cannabis cultivation
The government of the small European country have committed some grave errors in the process.
It's never easy to be green. However, the cannabis industry is no stranger to overcoming stigmas, if not hurdles. Not to mention the grotesque loses of the ball once governments intervene - from expanding access to basic regulation. The Dutch government has just received a reminder as their widely lauded first grow offer for the production of regulated recreational cannabis has been embarrassingly skidded. It's not even something to blame for COVID-19. Nor does it look like the Dutch have drawn any lessons from the highly controversial German cannabis tender for medicinal cultivation in 2017, which has not yet gone fully online. Holland is a sovereign country with 2 million fewer people than the US state of New York. What's going on there? How could the country of the coffee shop waste the ball so badly? At least for American Generation X, Holland became a beacon of cannasanity in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a time when American baby boomers in particular, who had inhaled with impunity in their vaunted youth, decided to further criminalize the plant and those who grew, used or sold it as they gained positions of political power. Drug testing became a bane for anyone trying to work in the United States. In Europe, things were better, but only just barely. One can still be arrested for possession, use, or sale of the drug. Just ask Spanish club owners during COVID-19. But drug testing never caught on, and neither did the obscene extremes of the drug war in the United States. As a result, there's a highly profitable, if not widespread, "underground" if you can call it that - from the mafia and terror-affiliated groups to entrepreneurial-minded patients with grow room and a few friends. Far beyond Holland, for example, there are many German magazines, if not an entire subculture based on home growing, which has certainly begun to organize for bigger things in recent years as medical use has become legal here. And if you really wanted to smoke weed in public, you could always take a visa-free trip across one border or another if you didn't have friends and didn't want to "shop" in the main station area of your local city. At least in Germany, you can find regulated sex trafficking and of course plenty of opportunities to buy all kinds of illegal substances. The situation was not hidden from the Dutch authorities. Indeed, various unsuccessful attempts have been made to curb the popularity of cannatourism and all have failed. These ranged from trying to shut down industry in border towns (especially with Germany) to introducing stricter regulations in the places where industry was active. See Amsterdam from yesterday and January 2021. None of these attempts during the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, although they caused losses, both legitimate and unjustified. For example, by 2014, coffee shops in every city that were located in the immediate vicinity of schools were closed due to such measures. There are around half as many shops in Amsterdam today as there were at the turn of the century. The other (international) victim was the famous Cannabis Cup competition. However, this did not solve the bigger problems. The coffeeshops that were still in operation had to find products somewhere - and while their storefronts may have dwindled, sales rose, and not just because other coffeeshops were closed. There was suddenly an upswing among local users. Until 2017, there was also a healthy domestic medical market, isolated from the coffee shop trade, because Dutch insurers were still reimbursing cannabis prescriptions from local patients. The fact that this ended when the German insurance industry was forced to cover medical cannabis claims meant that Dutch patients were then also forced into coffee shops just under four years ago. Indeed, from now on the formally medically regulated Dutch medical industry is mainly oriented towards export. If it weren't for Bedrocan, the oldest private grower in the world, the repeated mistakes in the German range would have eliminated most of the medical Flos that are still in pharmacies today.