Caution! No Blow Area Ahead

It’s becoming more and more a common sight in Dutch cities: a semi-official road sign that depicts a ban on using marihuana in public. One out of five municipalities has at least one neighbourhood where blowing is forbidden by a local law. In 2001 the first blow ban was issued by the city council of Venlo, but especially in the last two years the number of no-blow-areas has been exploding.

According to an article in today’s newspaper De Pers, half of the banning cities have decided to do so without a trace of a reason. “They don’t even have coffeeshops where you can buy drugs”, professor Dirk Korf (university of Amsterdam) tells the newspaper. “These kind of communities you see for example in the bible belt (a group of municipalities with a strongly religious population in the middle of the Netherlands, BB). They want a moral signal: our youth should not use drugs.”

But even in cities like Amsterdam, some neighbourhoods have decided to get the blow ban signs out.  De Baarsjes is one of them, with a ban for the Mercatorplace since 2006. And although there are serious problems concerning drugs in areas like this, not everybody thinks a ban on blowing really helps solving this. Says a shop owner from The Hague, where another blow ban is considered, in de Pers: “There is some trouble in this neighbourhood, but not from the marihuana selling coffeeshops. Blowing makes a person slow and quiet, not troublesome.”