City’s mayor says ‘drug tourists’ a nuisance in city centre.
A decision to move cafes selling cannabis out of the centre of the Dutch city of Maastricht to an industrial estate near the Belgian border has provoked an angry response from five adjacent Belgian towns – one of which has threatened to close its cross-border roads.
The move to an industrial park at Eijsden was given the go-ahead by the Supreme Court in The Hague on Wednesday, as a compromise in a bitter row between the mayor of Maastricht, Onno Hoes, a stalwart of prime minister Mark Rutte’s Liberal Party, and coffee shop owners.
Mr Hoes claims the 1.6 million foreign “drugs tourists” who visit the city’s 13 licensed coffee shops every year are “an unacceptable nuisance” and should be barred by the cafe owners in line with a recently introduced law that has been widely ignored elsewhere, including in Amsterdam. The owners say banning foreigners would devastate their businesses, have a detrimental effect on the local economy and lead to an increase in illegal street dealing – although some of the largest did agree to move to the outskirts to defuse the confrontation with the mayor.
Source: Peter Cluskey, Irish Times, 16/08/2013
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