Dutch coffee shops are selling adulterated Ganja thanks to police campaign against growers
Not just for personal use. A small-time cannabis producer in the Netherlands. Photo: THCganja/Flickr
Despite the Netherlands liberal reputation for allowing ‘coffee shops’ the small scale cannabis growers who supply them are being threatened with extinction due to increased police harassment.
The result is that coffee shops in Amsterdam and elsewhere in the Netherlands are now selling lower quality, and even dangerously adulterated merchandise sourced from major criminals, according to a report in PressEurop :
We spoke to a 36-year-old local council employee (who preferred to remain anonymous) who cultivates cannabis in the attic of his house in the working class neighbourhood of Woensel-West in Eindhoven. Like other small producers, he does not consider himself an outlaw. “My girlfriend and I grow the plants for our own consumption. The grass sold in coffee shops is expensive, and the quality is getting worse. It is mixed with chemical products, and often they try to make it heavier with powdered glass and metals.”
In his attic he has two growing cupboards with powerful lamps, each of which contains five cannabis plants. The council worker explained that he is careful to abide by the rules of the “tolerance” policy. Both he and his girlfriend own five plants – growing is officially illegal but only penalized when there are more than five plants per individual.However, in view of the fact that only female plants produce the flowers containing high levels of THC, many growers plant twice the officially tolerated number of seeds.
Bending the rules
Eighteen months ago, he received a visit from the police who had been tipped off by a neighbour. But the two officers concluded that he was not in serious breach of the law. Another grower, 40-year-old Kees, who lives in the town of Huizen, was not so lucky. “I wasn’t able to make the policeman understand that to have five plants, you have to plant a lot more seeds.
They destroyed everything.” Kees describes himself as a grower of “high-quality, 100% organic cannabis.” He sells any surplus that he doesn’t consume to coffee shops at prices ranging from 2,700 and 3,400 euros a kilo, depending on the quality and the customer.
Now a large number of mayors in the Netherlands want small-scale producers to be registered so they can legally sell their product to coffee shops.
At the moment coffee shops in the Netherlands are authorized to sell up to 5 grams per customer, but are expected to materialize the product from nowhere, as under Dutch law they have no legitimate source of supply.