JOINT OPERATION

A thick pall of sweet-smelling hashish has hung over the Netherlands since
the first "coffee shop" opened its doors in 1972.

Since then, the country's famously relaxed drug laws have attracted droves
of weed lovers from across the globe and earned the country a sometimes
controversial reputation for unparalleled liberality.

At its peak in 1997 the country's network of coffee shops ran to almost
1,200 cafes where anyone over 18 could exercise their legal right to buy up
to five grams (a sixth of an ounce) of marijuana at a time. But thirty years
later, the novelty appears to have worn off and the increasingly
conservative Dutch authorities are drawing up plans to turn back the clock.

With the conservative Christian Democrat party holding sway in the latest
three-party coalition and the Labour party consigned to opposition, the
country's traditionally liberal approach towards drugs are up for review.

This week the Dutch public got a foretaste of exactly how the government is
planning to sweep aside decades of tolerance, when justice minister Piet
Hein Donner publicly outlined plans to allow only Dutch citizens to visit
coffee shops.

In a move designed to tackle the perceived scourge of drug tourists, he said
that coffee shop customers should be asked to show their passport and prove
that they live locally before being served.

Concerned too about the prevalence of hard drugs in the Netherlands, he
threatened to withdraw the landing rights of any airline regularly found to
be transporting drug smugglers from former colonies such as the Antilles and
Surinam.

His comments come hot on the heels of a decision to ban Dutch police
officers from frequenting coffee shops, the construction of emergency jail
cells for drug smugglers and a tough new anti-smoking law which stipulates
that employees should not be exposed to tobacco smoke.

The Dutch coffee shop business, it is fair to say, is not what it once was.

New figures show that the number of drug cafes fell to 782 legal
establishments last year from 1,200 in 1997, a drop of over 30%. In the past
six years hundreds of coffee shops found to be flouting the law by offering
harder drugs or selling to underage customers were shut down - either
permanently or temporarily - and had their sales licences revoked.

This latest crackdown appears, however, to be far more serious than anything
which has preceded it. The Dutch government is under mounting pressure to
take action from neighbouring Germany, which sees thousands of its citizens
flood across the border in search of marijuana every day.

Many of the dozens of towns that squat on the Dutch side of the border
between the two countries have been transformed into open-air drugs
supermarkets.

The problem is at its worst in Venlo, a town of 90,000 people nestling on
the banks of the river Maas in the south of the country. Just five minutes
drive from the German border, it is awash with drugs, dealers and tourists.
Five million Germans live within 30 miles, and as many as 4,000 of them
visit every day.

Angered by such liberality on its doorstep, Berlin wants nothing less than a
total ban on soft drugs in the Netherlands. The Dutch authorities seem
unlikely to go that far but they do mean business. A treaty allowing the
German and Dutch police to cooperate in border regions is likely to be
signed soon and the Dutch government is reportedly close to drawing up new
narcotics legislation.

The Dutch government may, however, find the going uphill. It wants local
councils and coffee shops themselves to stop foreigners from buying pot, but
neither seem keen to comply. Both the councils and the cafes say they
believe that the move would merely push the entire drugs trade underground
and force people to buy off street dealers and criminals.

There is also the small matter of money. In 1999, the latest year for which
figures are available, Dutch coffee shops turned over €300m (UKP210m) -
money which is all subject to government tax.

The Dutch government is therefore faced with a stark choice: to keep taking
the money or to appease the Germans.