Homegrown Fantasy Coffeeshop Closure Ceremony

Protest planned against Dutch 'weed pass'

There was one exception: the "Easy Going" shop of Marc Josemans, chairman of the coffee shop owners' association, which remained open just long enough to provoke two legal conflicts he hopes may ultimately derail the policy.


First Josemans turned away a group of foreigners who oppose the rule, and who went to the police to file a discrimination complaint. Then he started selling weed to anybody willing to buy, without checking for passes.--Miami Herald. May 1st, 2012.

 

 

Protest planned against Dutch 'weed pass'

A tourist smokes marijuana at a coffee shop called 'de Dampkring' or 'Atmosphere,' in the centre of Amsterdam, Netherlands. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong, File)

AMSTERDAM — A policy barring foreign tourists from buying marijuana in the Netherlands went into effect in parts of the country Tuesday, with attention focused on the southern city of Maastricht, where a cafe was warned over violating the ban and a buyers' protest is planned for later in the day.

Weed is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but it has been sold openly for decades in small amounts in designated cafes known as "coffee shops" under the country's famed tolerance policy.
Under a government policy change, as of May 1, only holders of a "weed pass" are supposed to be allowed to purchase the drug in three southern provinces. Nonresidents aren't eligible for the pass, which means tourists are effectively banned.

The policy isn't supposed to go into effect in Amsterdam, home to around a third of the country's coffee shops, until next year -- and it may never be. The city opposes the idea and the conservative national government collapsed last week, raising questions about whether a new Cabinet will persevere with the policy change after elections are held in September.

Most attention Tuesday was on the city of Maastricht, which borders both Belgium and Germany and which has suffered the effects of a constant flow of traffic from non-Dutch Europeans driving to the city just to purchase as much cannabis as possible and drive back home.

Most shops in Maastricht plan to refuse to use the pass and kept their doors shut Tuesday.

There was one exception: the "Easy Going" shop of Marc Josemans, chairman of the coffee shop owners' association, which remained open just long enough to provoke two legal conflicts he hopes may ultimately derail the policy.

First Josemans turned away a group of foreigners who oppose the rule, and who went to the police to file a discrimination complaint. Then he started selling weed to anybody willing to buy, without checking for passes.

"The police paid me a visit about a half an hour later and warned me I was violating the new rules, and if I do it again, I'll be closed down for a month," he said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press.

Josemans said he planned to continue selling to all comers, and he fully expects to see his shop closed. His response to that would be to take his case to the European Court of Justice.
"Discrimination is never the right answer," he said.

Early reports from other affected cities -- Tilburg, Roermond and Eindhoven, among others -- were that most shops were either remaining closed, or ignoring the pass.

"They'll wait it out until this whole pass plan goes away," Josemans said.

Even most Dutch weed smokers aren't getting the passes, assuming the law won't be enforced. Some are worried the information they have obtained a weed pass will somehow leak from a government database and cause them difficulties with health care insurance or getting a mortgage.

A former chairman of the Netherlands' Police Union Hans van Duijn told reporters in front of "Easy Going" that he believes the new policy's negative side effects will outweigh any benefits and that enforcing it would waste precious resources.

"Everyone who is rejected here will walk a few meters (yards) down the street to the drug dealers who drive over from Rotterdam, among other places, and ride around in large numbers," he said.
Robert Anthony, a Belgian, said he "regularly" comes to the Netherlands "to buy weed in peace."

He predicted it will be "chaos on the streets very soon."

Ironically, the reason the Dutch tolerance policy got going in the 1970s was not on the theory that marijuana was OK -- it has always been viewed as a public health problem -- but because containing it in shops seemed like a pragmatic way to deal with the problems caused by street dealing.

But a growing body of evidence linking the drug to mental illness and a decade-long shift to the political right in the Netherlands has already led to minor changes in the policy, notably the closure of many shops located near schools or known for causing problems.
But the weed pass policy represents a significant change.

Asked whether he thought the policy will succeed, Justice Minister Ivo Opstelten said he was certain it will.

"The next Cabinet can always roll back everything, but they will continue prudent policies," he said. "I think this is smart policy, so I'm not worried about that."

http://www.cp24.com/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20120501/120501_netherlands_marijuana/20120501/?hub=CP24Extras

The War on some drugs meets Virgin Google U.N and wikileaks

  The War on some drugs meets Virgin Google U.N and wikileaks

I get my pot absolutely free from the Women's Alliance for medical marijuana which doesn't charge, its a cooperative and we do what we can to keep it going, now they have been raided we're gonna have to do more, we're gonna have to decentralize even further, decentralize the production, the making of the tinctures, the cookies, the brownies and whatever forms we wanna take it in that's best for our condition, some people still smoke it, and were gonna have to decentralize the growth and production and distribution.--Robert Anton Wilson, 2002, Santa Cruz CA.

I was about to start a piece about the proposed Dutch changes in laws concerning their famous cannabis coffee shops, due to the fact that today, April 18th 2012, my employers and some representatives from other Dutch Coffee Shops lodged a court injunction against the Dutch Government and their plans to implement the ‘weed pass’ nationwide, not only in the problematic southern (boarder) states.

However, I was interrupted by discovering a short excerpt from a video interview with Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange in which he speaks about Marijuana, the so called ‘war on drugs’ and cognitive liberty in an intelligent, witty and precise manner. The entire debate, the first of a new series developed by Google called ‘Versus War On Drugs’

It has been a part of my fantasy writings over the last three years since Wikileaks burst onto the global scene, that they might eventually highlight the crooked ‘war on drugs’ along with their long list of unfairly secretive business transactions and government/corporate corruption. After all, the ‘war on some drugs’ spans the globe, wastes Trillions of Dollars and brings terror and torture into the lives of Billions.

Although provoked by the questioner, Assange throws down his libertarian wisdom and sense of individualist anarchism, in my view, all over the ‘war on some drugs’, which leads to a much clearer view of the current Dutch coffee shop debacle, and the sense of discrimination applied further to the neurological realm.

The similarities between the fights for digital freedoms and the fights for cognitive freedoms seem to be converging at an ever increasing, exponential rate. As Douglas Rushkoff has put it ‘program or be programmed’ implying we have the means to program ourselves and our environment if we choose to engage. But engage with what?

Some brave and noble folk are perpetually fighting the digital baddies, or those government think tanks, those lawyers and those entertainment industry cry-babies, by challenging their draconian proposed measures and new laws and terror scenarios with superior information, scientific and balanced feedback, and most importantly a decentralized network philosophy. The EFF, Wikileaks, and boing boing contributors exhibit these positive attributes and almost singlehandedly threaten any proposed ‘new world order’ once again by obsoleting the opposition with superior methodology, intelligence and strategy.

We the cannabis culture, or we the collective of self-owning ones who enjoy cannabis and its many benefits (health, speech, thought, economy) welcome the intelligent decentralized strategies performed by example by these defenders of ‘equalibrium’ and ‘fairness’ with a particular fondness of going after the biggest, baddest sons of bitches out there, the so called ‘intelligence services’ and private ‘spy agencies’, the military industrial complex and surveillance industries, and of course, lets not forget the limp and mostly empty ‘mainstream media’ that apparently could not and today cannot compare with even 5 % of Wikileaks, or Boingboing for that matter, based on information content (based on predictability of story and coverage of events). Try it, go on. Go to BBC website, and then to Wikileaks, then the daily mail, and then boingboing. Now, anything surprise you? I recall the saying "an empty vessel sounds loudest'

May I attempt to further suppose that the key to keeping the ‘coffee-shop’ scene and industry (that I personally work in) alive and kicking is.... surprise or unpredictability in the face of the easily guessed at(that which is low in information) the same old game and the same old tactics which often involve bullying, meaningless statements plus the arts and crafts of ‘disinformation’. Superior experimental intelligence cuts through these centrist authoritarian/totalitarian games like a warm knife through soft hash.

After watching the full Google versus debate I feel like I have ingested a few grams of some psychedelic compound, when listening to the crazy prohibitionists and corporate military propagandists repeat their 'rhetoric' I started having hallucinations that Julian Assange was in the debate, and Russel Brand too, who for me, were the only characters who added any spice and anything approaching a representation of the 'drug culture' but no MUSIC, no ART, no LITERATURE or COMEDY was presented as evidence, no mention of Terence Mckenna, Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, Sasha Shulgin, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kessey, no, not a trace.

Whereas, for me, these are the individual thinkers and writers who dedicated their lives to coming to understand the question of 'alchemically mediated consciousness' and so then, by default the major blockage and 'befuddlement' factor: the age old inquisition, the prohibition and the wars against altered states of consciousness, and it's current incarnation: the global war on SOME drugs.

And please, lets not forget the terminology used to disrupt the thinking process, once more, 'the war on drugs' actually functions as a 'war on SOME drugs' and the lack of definitions in this particular area, being that it involves complex chemical neurological and environmental factors, remains a consistant strategy employed by the prohibitionists and inquisitors world wide. Beware of the FNORDS!

"There's more of everything, the more they fight it the more drugs appear, it's like Lao Tzu said "The more laws they pass the more criminals they create and the more weapons they create the more terror stalks the land" - the more clearer the explanations the more frogs fall out of the sky.--Robert Anton Wilson, 2002, Santa Cruz CA.

Watch for yourself here:



Steven 'fly agaric 23' Pratt. 18th April 2012.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=gSrN2zIRwN8