What does the closure of the Netherlands’ biggest cannabis-selling cafe mean for Dutch drugs policy? asks Giles Smith-Scott on TheHollandBureau.com.

The province of Zeeland doesn’t make the front pages of the Dutch press very often, it being regarded by everyone as little more than a beach destination devoid of anything else of interest.
But this week the judgement against the owner of the coffeeshop Checkpoint in Terneuzen by the Middelburg court has drawn considerable commentary.
The reason for the interest beyond sleepy Zeeland is of course the recognition that the judgement could have major repercussions for Dutch tolerance towards soft drugs in general. Checkpoint’s owner, Meddie Willemsen, was given a jail sentence and ordered to pay a large fine for overstepping the rules surrounding coffeeshop activity. Not a good sign, and perhaps the start of a nationwide roll-back of soft drug outlets?
But its not quite so simple. Willemsen has already served the 16 week jail sentence prior to the trial, and the prosecution had demanded 18 months. Likewise the fine may sound a lot at 9.7 million Euro, but the prosecution had demanded 28 million, and the judges even reduced the compromise figure of 14.6 million by one third because of the collusion of Terneuzen council with Willemsen’s business. Since Willemsen had been raking it in, this is a pretty good outcome.
Here we get to the central issue. Checkpoint’s operation under Willemsen, according to the prosecution, functioned with around 100 people and was a complete underground business. For this reason the court agreed that it could be named a ‘criminal organisation’. Never has a coffeeshop been placed in that category before. A bad sign.
But the thing is this. Checkpoint only became so big as it did because of the support of the local council. I described this in February and there is no need to go over it again – the importance of using Checkpoint to get a grip on terneuzen’s hard drug problem, the support for its out-of-town location in 2005 with a large car park, its licence to run a bar and restaurant as part of the coffeeshop (as a local resident and patron nicely put it, “in order to numb the waiting time” with the long queues for the marijuana).
This criminal organisation was totally integrated into Terneuzen’s political and social scene. It paid its taxes, probably more honestly than a regular business. It doesn’t mean everyone approved, but it does mean its impossible to talk of black-and-white state v. criminals on this one.
But Checkpoint’s business was so big – 10 kilos of marijuana a day, minumum – that it trampled over all the tolerance rules about sales for own use only. Drugs tourists from the South and the East were piling in to take it home, and this was the real problem. The local councillors and police were spared being included in Willemsen’s criminal organisation by the court, but the difference is, as John Cleese would put it, ‘wafer-thin’. There is no way that Checkpoint could have grown so out of control without this support.
And that is how the judgement should be understood. Yes, there has been a shift away from tolerance in the Netherlands, particularly among the police and some municipalities, particularly along the Dutch borders. Yes, several police chiefs have come out with criticisms of how the continuing soft drug rules do not fit with a coffeeshop scene selling stronger strains of weed and with connections to various criminal networks.
But the Checkpoint judgement is more a message to the local council in Terneuzen as it is to any coffeeshop – don’t let this get out of hand. It was the state prosecutor aiming at the Wild West style local administrators as much as at the local entrepreneur and the merry joint-rolling French and Belgians.
The judges commented last week that it was surprising there had been no effort by any arm of the state to scale Checkpoint back to a ‘normal’ business before the arrests were made. Clearly at some point it was decided to make it an example and cut through the inertia. Only a prosecution could do that. But the results speak for themselves.
Should other coffeeshops be worried? Some may face hyperactive police chiefs. And they will need to be careful. But if they are not located in the Dutch border region, probably not.