DUTCH BURGHERS PLAN MCDOPE, A DRUG DRIVE-THRU

FROM behind a row of giant multicoloured bongs (hashish pipes), the
pony-tailed man in the Bob Marley T-shirt produced a block of dark
brown cannabis resin and said it would cost 50 marks (UKP15) for five
grams. "We can give you hashish, weed, whatever. Just don't tell the
cops," he added, smiling. Freeshop Sky is one of an estimated 65
shops, backrooms and bars illegally selling drugs in Venlo, a small
Dutch town a mile from the border with Germany where the trade of
cannabis is just as often conducted in kilograms as grams. The illegal
drugs industry has grown so rapidly since regular border checks were
abandoned in the mid-Nineties that the local council is considering a
desperate plan: it hopes to clear the trade out of the town centre by
licensing the world's first drive-through marijuana bars on the
outskirts of Venlo.

The plan, which Venlo's mayor and 30 aldermen will vote on next
Wednesday, has been welcomed in the town, where residents feel
unnerved by the presence of about 300 illegal drug dealers on the
streets. In some roads, up to 80 per cent of houses are thought to be
in the hands of dealers, including Maaskade, where Freeshop Sky, next
to the B-1 Sex Shop and Sex Shop Climax, is one of a number of
souvenir boutiques and cafes suspected of selling drugs illegally.

"This is a small town and drugs have taken over here," Ria, a
pensioner who has lived in Venlo all her life, said. She pointed to a
boarded-up shop off the town's busy main square: "In this building
they had jewellery in the window and that is what they claimed to
sell, but they were really dealing drugs."

The drive-through idea is proof that Venlo, where so far this year
police have boarded up 24 houses where cannabis was being sold, is
losing the battle against drugs. The plan has provoked a hostile
reaction from the German town of Viersen, just 15 miles away, while
officials in the Dutch Ministry of Health have given a warning that it
could undermine their efforts to promote careful drug use. The Dutch
press, meanwhile, has come up with its own name for the new-look
marijuana bars: "McDope".

About 500 German tourists travel every day to Venlo to take advantage
of Dutch laws allowing up to five grams of cannabis to be sold in the
town's five licensed "coffee shops". Many, however, are in search of
bigger quantities and for this they need the black market, to the
extent that police now speak of a "shadow economy" in Venlo worth
hundreds of millions of Dutch guilders. It has taken just six years
and the Schengen open borders agreement, which came into force in
1995, to transform what used to be called "the town of laughter" into
a place now known across The Netherlands for its drugs problem.

"After Schengen we were suddenly opened up to five million Germans
within a radius of 50 kilometres and a number of them were interested
in buying drugs," Twan Beurskens, manager of the anti-drugs offensive
at Venlo's town hall, said. "Before the mid-Nineties the only places
with licensed coffee shops were the big cities. There was only one
cafe illegally selling drugs in Venlo and the police talked about it
as if it was a big problem. Before Schengen there would be a big queue
to cross the border and there was a risk that you would be stopped and
searched. Now you drive straight through."

Although the drive-through coffee shops are just one option, if the
council endorses the plan the process of awarding licences will begin
almost immediately and they could be open by the end of the year.
There is also the prospect that other towns might follow suit. "In
general terms, I would be concerned because this idea could catch on,"
Franz Trautmann of the Trimbos Institute, the Dutch national centre
for mental health and drug addiction, said.