It Is Time For Ireland To Wake Up

Alcohol is bad, nature is a better chemist

Ireland, by its very nature, should become a model of tolerance and intellect for the rest of the world...afterall....no one else is doing it...the market for tolerance and real intellect is WIDE OPEN...with electronic security and a little know-how the crime can be squashed and the profits can be enormous, all the while setting an example for the world about what freedom means.

A Dutch City Seeks to End Drug Tourism

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/world/europe/18dutch....neral

MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — On a recent summer night, Marc Josemans’s Easy Going Coffee Shop was packed. The lines to buy marijuana and hashish stretched to the reception area where customers waited behind glass barriers.

Thousands of “drug tourists” sweep into this small, picturesque city in the southeastern part of the Netherlands every day — as many as two million a year, city officials say. Their sole purpose is to visit the city’s 13 “coffee shops,” where they can buy varieties of marijuana with names like Big Bud, Amnesia and Gold Palm without fear of prosecution.

It is an attraction Maastricht and other Dutch border cities would now gladly do without. Struggling to reduce traffic jams and a high crime rate, the city is pushing to make its legalized use of recreational drugs a Dutch-only policy, banning sales to foreigners who cross the border to indulge. But whether the European Union’s free trade laws will allow that is another matter.

The case, now wending its way through the courts, is being closely watched by legal scholars as a test of whether the European Court of Justice will carve out an exception to trade rules — allowing one country’s security concerns to override the European Union’s guarantee of a unified and unfettered market for goods and services.

City officials say they have watched with horror as a drug tolerance policy intended to keep Dutch youth safe — and established long before Europe’s borders became so porous — has morphed into something else entirely. Municipalities like Maastricht, in easy driving distance from Belgium, France and Germany, have become regional drug supply hubs.

Maastricht now has a crime rate three times that of similar-size Dutch cities farther from the border. “They come with their cars and they make a lot of noise and so on,” said Gerd Leers, who was mayor of Maastricht for eight years. “But the worst part is that this group, this enormous group, is such an attractive target for criminals who want to sell their own stuff, hard stuff, and they are here too now.”

In recent years, crime in Maastricht, a city of cobblestone lanes and medieval structures, has included a shootout on the highway, involving a Bulgarian assassin hired to kill a rival drug producer.

Mr. Leers used to call the possibility of banning sales to foreigners a long shot. But last month, Maastricht won an early round. The advocate general for the European Court of Justice, Yves Bot, issued a finding that “narcotics, including cannabis, are not goods like others and their sale does not benefit from the freedoms of movement guaranteed by European law.”

Mr. Leers called the ruling “very encouraging.” Coffee shop owners saw it differently.

“There is no way this will hold up,” said John Deckers, a spokesman for the Maastricht coffee shop owners’ association. “It is discrimination against other European Union citizens.”

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