It breaks down like this: it's legal to buy it, it's legal to own it, and if you're the proprietor of a hash bar, it's legal to sell it. It's legal to carry it, but that doesn't really matter 'cause get a load of this, all right? If you get stopped by the cops in Amsterdam, it's illegal for them to search you. I mean, that's a right the cops in Amsterdam don't have.
Cannabis is illegal in the Netherlands. Only the sale of small amounts of cannabis is tolerated in licensed coffeeshops. The problem with this system is that coffeeshops need to buy what they sell illegally on the black market.
Where do they go to get it? Amsterdam is my favorite yearly visit to enjoy some chilled coffee shops and eat BLT but I guessed it was grown in the Netherlands by "turning a blind eye". Growing so much at such a high quality, I can't imagine folk are importing it. I hope to live in Amsterdam some day after I win the lottery :D
> Growing so much at such a high quality, I can't imagine folk are importing it.
No, the Netherlands grows its marijuana domestically (and exports about half of what is grown domestically).
But to be honest, it's not a huge amount. The Netherlands grows about 270,000 kg of marijuana annually. To put that into perspective, about 17,600,000 pounds are grown each year in just five US states (Washington, California, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Hawaii).
We do that in forests and cornfields. After a while we just check if they have be cleared yet by farmer or government. Dropping the seeds this way is cheap.
It is not even legal to trade. It is tolerated (but not quite legal) to trade and own small amounts (5g), and a coffee shop may have 300g in stock on their premises. The shop needs to acquire its weed in illegal, non-tolerated ways. This causes all kinds of problems and absurdities.
Despite our reputation, the Netherlands are now behind when it comes to legalization of marijuana.
Which, when you think about it, makes utterly no sense. They have to buy it from quasi-gangsters on the gray/black market. That puts regular shop owners in a perilous situation. Although I'm not that dramatic to realize that wholesale pot dealers in The Netherlands are probably more like regular businessmen rather than violent criminals. But still.
Vice recently did an episode on one of the top seed producers in the Netherlands (which obviously requires cultivating it) and they seemed very professional. They were organizing month long expeditions to remote areas of the Congo in search of genetically isolated strains and lobbying governments for decriminalization as well as running bio labs.
Wherever there is a black market there is much more crime, especially of the violent variety. Looking at crime in the Netherlands, I would venture to guess that its very much like California's market pre-legalization where most growers operated as legitimate, albeit heavily under-regulated, businesses that could still turn to local police in case of robbery, threats, etc. but still have to worry about flying under the radar (like when the DEA raided a bunch of collectives in California because they were too close to schools)
