Ush, does The Netherlands have a big problem due to the coffee shops (are they only in Amsterdam or everywhere?)? I appreciate it is also a cultural thing, so may not be so easy to map from country to country (look at how 24 hour alcohol licenses didn't change the UK drinking culture at all).
We got them everywhere. Every city. Even in my parents town, with only 12000 citizens they got a coffeeshop. In the city I live, which has 187000 citizens, we got like about 10 coffeeshops. Amsterdam has hundreds.
Coffeeshops don't give any problems at all. Only bad thing about it is that they get most of their weed out of the criminal circuit, in the Netherlands you can (only) have up to 5 home grown plants per household.. which people smoke all theirselves or sell something. What you could say is that the frontdoor is open and legal and the backdoor is criminal and illegal.
Biggest problem the Netherlands got is that the other countries in Europe don't do the same thing, so we got all their tourists to visit us and behave like idiots. The municipalities at the borders with Europe(Belgium/Germany) and the city of Amsterdam(but they use to have tourists for everything like the red light district etc) suffer the most. What could be done is to not sell it anymore to foreigners.. but that doesn't solve the weedproblem every country has.
But lets get to the facts, the weed branche makes lots of money, you can't keep it away from criminals. Unless you legalize it. What should be done is (what the party I vote for proclaims) legalize everything from beginning to end. From the growth of the weed till the point where they sell it.
We got less addicts to weed and people usually stop smoking it after they finish their study or get children.
