Perhaps they’ve calculated that the drug business costs them more than it brings in.
If so then they are about to discover that they are mistaken.
On a normal summer weekend...from Friday to Monday...I’d make a honest bet that at least fifteen thousand British tourists are in Amsterdam. Toss in the Germans and the French...plus another two thousand Americans who flew in, and at least forty thousand folks are there to use cannabis and play as a tourist. Most cities in America would beg for something like that....weekend after weekend.
After spending fifteen years in Europe and at least three weeks of that touring the country of the Netherlands...I’m of the mind that the locals really have gotten to hate the drug-usage angle to their lives.
The last time I spent a weekend there...I’d stopped in at a restaurant on a business-related street. There were only a couple of open tables and the guy stuck me and the wife next to some 25-year old gal. What I noticed immediately was that she was on some LSD high and she spent almost the 70 minutes I was there...sipping a tiny bit of soup...drop by drop and being so fascinated with the soup on the spoon. She’d stop occasionally and then gaze at her fingernails as though she’d just acquired them. At the end as I paid...the owner apologized to me....in plain English....there were so few tables left and he could not kick her out. I asked if this was an issue, and he said that he had a dozen customers a day like this....and they occupied tables for almost two hours at a time...barely eating and mostly enjoying their high. He hated their business.