Holland targets its drugs-and-death tourism

It’s no coincidence that under a right-leaning Prime Minister, two old debates are back to prominence in the Netherlands, both related to hard-to-define tourisms:  “Bad tourism,” “dark tourism“, “medical tourism” or the less contentious “new tourism.”

Labels aside, they’re highly controversial and tied to ideology: drug tourism and assisted-suicide tourism.

Both forms have made international headlines recently because the Dutch conservative government wants to put an end to the former and curtail the latter, despite the vehement opposition of liberal parties, local officials, civic movements and worries over the impact such measures will have on local and national economies.

For many young Europeans,  their first parent-free trip to Amsterdam is a rite of passage,  and not for the unique architecture, beautiful canals, and rich museums, but rather to explore the internationally-renowned coffeeshops where they can buy marijuana in small amounts and smoke it legally.

But this is big business.  The official number of annual marijuana visitors is almost five million in Amsterdam alone. The federal government wants it to stop and has implemented various measures to ensure it will.  First, last year in southern border towns including Maastricht they prohibited the sale of pot to all foreigners except for Germans and Belgians to relieve traffic congestion. Then the prohibition was extended to other regions and all visitors.  Amsterdam had been excluded because the city government is against the curbs and the coffeshops have been able to exert enough pressure to hold them off.  Until now.

If Prime Minister Mark Rutte gets his way, the resistance is pointless. Citing, among other reasons, the criminal drug industry allegedly developed around the coffeshops, next month the government plans to begin the first phase of a program to restrict coffeeshop operations, hoping that by the end of the year all drug tourism will be eliminated.

As for the other tourism on the ropes, officially only Dutch residents should receive medical assistance to commit suicide. But the law doesn’t prohibit doctors from administering euthanasia to non-residents. The Netherlands was the first country to legalize euthanasia and its legislation on the right to die is considered the most liberal in the world, although it applies  only to cases of ”hopeless and unbearable” suffering. (That said, the Netherlands is not the only destination for legal euthanasia. First and foremost is Zurich, Switzerland, where hundreds of tourists, mostly British, make the journey to end their lives.)

It’s not the existence of assisted-suicide tourism that’s behind the latest controversy but, rather, the implicit danger that it could spin out of control, ‘a la coffeeshops’, thanks to two new initiatives pushed by the organization Right to Die: To make euthanasia widely available by creating  mobile teams to assist patients to die at  home, and by proposing legislation to give the right to die to everybody over 70 years old.

Conservative members of the government and various religious organizations fear that such measures could trigger a wave of euthanasia tourism. Right or not, the country’s longstanding reputation as a haven for live-and-let-live — or die-and-let-die — is under assault as never before.


/Forbes/