Amsterdam Was Stuck In My Head
There’s been a flurry of fun articles detailing the closing of “half of the brothels and the little coffee shops where cannabis can be bought and smoked on prostitution vendors and coffee shops in Amsterdam that are allegded to be connected to overall crime.” What’s interesting is that the big show of law enforcement power is actually part of a trend in the Netherlands to scale-back their famously hedonistic drug and prostitution policies. Although it will still be easy to buy marijuana and prosecutors still won’t prosecute anyone for it, they have started the process of banning hallucinogenic mushrooms, the other “only-Amsterdam” legal treat.
I’m of a mixed mind about what’s going on. On one hand, there is clearly a huge tourism benefit from being the Western world’s adult theme park. I was in Amsterdamn this summer with three of my friends, and I can testify to the fact that most of the guests at the Flying Pig Hostel were not there for the beautiful old buildings or the world class museums. On the other hand, it must be annoying for those living in Amsterdam – which really is a culturally first-rate city with financial institutions, cool bars and all the rest – to be constantly deluged with 19 year old Americans jumping into canals during a bad mushroom trip. Also, from my own experience, I can say that Amsterdam seems to have a larger problem with hard drugs than other European cities. During a four week stretch this past summer, I traveled through a good bit of Europe, including major cities with tons of young tourists (Rome, Prague, Budapest, Vienna), cities that only have tourists (Dubrovnik) and cities in countries with much more serious organized crime issues than in Western Europe (Belgrade) and only in Amsterdam were we openly solicited to buy heroin or coke. I can understand how the actual residents of a city would get a tad fed up with that.
As far as prostitution goes, it may very well foster an organized crime problem, but there didn’t seem to be much of a quality of life problem. From our experience, which oddly enough, was similar to Jim Joyner’s, the prostitution hardly rose to the level of nuisance. In fact, the red light district with its famous windows (which, yes, we walked around rather extensively) seemed to do a better job of containing prostitution to a limited area, than in cities like Berlin, where prostitues would just be out on the street in certain neighborhoods.
The best I can tell from the articles I’ve read is that, if you go to Amsterdamn with the expressed purpose of sparking up a machine rolled joint and staring at Rembrandt’s for hours on end, you can still do that. You’ll just have to look a tad harder for the best coffee shop.
I should also note that it’s almost unfair that Amsterdam has this reputation for being this hedonistic wonderland. Sure, marijuana is de facto legal and everything, but the city has so much more. The great museums, beautiful old buildings, nice parks, amazing public transportation and a great proliferation of yummy Turkish food. Oh wait, did I mention that you can buy pot in shops without a care in the world? That’s cool too.
PS – One particularly charming bit of the Guardian piece on Amsterdam is the Social Democratic way the city authorities are going about shutting down the prostitution rings and coffee shops, namely by “offer[ing] retraining to prostitutes and coffee-shop employees who lost their jobs.”
