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Comment by slowpoison | Hacker News Reader

Anybody comment on what the situation is in Amsterdam, where pot is legal, at least, in small quantities?

… as I understand it there are two main problems with the status quo. One is that under the old tolerance regime there’s still no way for a coffee shop to legally obtain the supply of marijuana you need to operate on the scale of a business. Consequently, de facto legalization hasn’t actually eliminated the black market and associated criminality. Secondarily, the main market for the coffee shops turns out to be drug tourists from abroad. That reduces the Dutch political constituency for keeping them open. And the two factors interact together to create a situation where there’s a strong case to be made that legal coffee shops (by bringing drug tourists from the UK and the US into shops that need to tap an illegal wholesale market to gain their supplies) increase the scale of organized crime in the Netherlands.

– http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/10/coffee-shop-crackd...

So really, legalisation would work a lot better if all countries did it (eliminating drug tourism).

No, you just need to avoid doing it in a half-hearted manner. In the case of Holland, why shouldn't there be drug tourism? Why is it any worse than, say, coffee tourism? or wine and food tourism?

Because the people drawn to drug tourism are more irresponsible, shallow, and opportunistic than your average tourist. Not always, sometimes not outrageously so, but in general. If you've been to Amsterdam, you might have noticed this, as I did.

So? Lots of people are irresponsible, shallow and opportunistic. I've seen Americans complaining loudly about prices and the lack of English while touring Italy, but nobody seems to want to ban the Duomo.

I was surprised Amsterdam seemed to maintain a clean, moderate, respectable attitude during daylight hours. I noticed the city is an insanely wealthy and beautiful place. I would guess they are making a ton of money off tourists.

  the main market for the coffee shops turns out to be drug
  tourists from abroad

That's not true. Although a number of coffee shops in Amsterdam and in cities close to the borders with Germany and Belgium primarily sell to tourists, there are many more coffeeshops that just sell to the local users.

Anybody comment on what the situation is in Amsterdam

Just a note of caution - while looking at what other places do definitely brings information to the table, you can't always say "if place A does X, doing X in place B will make it like place A".

The classic example of this is alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are not prohibited, but if you walk through an Italian town center at 11pm on a Friday night you won't see the scenes of public drunkeness and alcohol-fueled disorder that you see, say, in an English town center at the same time.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the larger point, in these kinds of policy area there is a level of unpredictability as to what will happen when a previously controlled substance is legalised, because patterns of consumption are convolved with local social norms.

AFAIK, pot isn't actually legal, it's just decriminalized, and not very strictly enforced.

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