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.
My mother and I were in Amsterdam in April, some years back, and a number of people remarked about how much more pleasant it was at that time of year than when the summer crowds arrived to lie about stoned.
Naturally, I haven’t run the cost-benefit analysis on this change in policy, but it stands to reason the Dutch government has.
I like the idea that an owner of a restaurant hates a paying customer. I never heard that complaint in my life from the managers/owners of any of the restaurants I worked for.
As long as someone ordered something nobody cared if they ate it or not. The cost was still the same.