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items tagged with coffee shops
Amsterdam coffee shops are a favorite hangout for tourist. The most important product of a coffee shop in Amsterdam is not coffee but cannabis. And since Holland is one of the few places where this is sold legally the coffee shops attract many tourist.A group of teenage English boys, their polite manners contrasting with the hair-raising heavy metal designs on their T-shirts, is also drinking the warm, frothy brew. Above them a large flat screen TV is showing a documentary about Antarctic bird life.
A penguin protects her chicks from a hungry gull as two Spanish girls debate whether to get high on "White Widow," "Blueberry" — brands from the marijuana menu — or to take a slice of the peanut butter and white chocolate weed-laced "space cake."
From inside this cozy, 100-year-old-bar-turned-hash-house it appears the Amsterdam drug scene has mellowed since the Dutch government began to "decriminalize" cannabis in the late 1970s.
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Authorities announced a major crackdown on organized crime in Amsterdam's Red Light District yesterday , for the first time allowing national police investigators and tax authorities to see the extent of what had long been seen as a local problem.With its scantily clad prostitutes posing in brothel windows and coffee shops oozing the pungent aroma of marijuana smoke, the area's seediness has always been part of its attraction.
But the district is a magnet for petty criminals and, authorities believe, human traffickers, drug lords, and mobsters who take advantage of the situation to launder money. Prostitution is legal in the Netherlands, and coffee shops are licensed to sell small amounts of marijuana. But prostitutes don't have cash registers and drug vendors don't give receipts, making it easy for them to launder money for crime lords.
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Amsterdam's Hash museum - or Museum of Hash, Marijuana and Hemp, to give it its full title, is to be found on one of the canals running through the city's red light district. Tourists of all ages and nationalities are drawn to the area by its reputation as a haven of easily accessible sex and drugs.
Sitting at a canal-side cafe, Ken Johnson the Museum's manager - or plant curator as he prefers to be called - warned that although most foreigners think soft drugs are legal in The Netherlands, that's far from the case.
For virtually everyone, except the coffee shops who can have a small amount (but where they get it from is a bit of a legal mystery), and regular users in very small quantities, it's very tightly controlled.
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If you suddenly find yourself in Amsterdam, the capital of the Netherlands and perhaps one of the most liberated cities in the world, rejoice because you are in heaven. But if you have only limited time to go around and enjoy the city, don’t be confused by all the things that can be done because there are hundreds, from shopping, sight seeing and dining out. The best time to go is in the morning when there aren't so many people crowding its streets. During the afternoon, at around 3 p.m., there is an outpouring of people and you’ll never guess where they come from—Asian, Westerners and Europeans alike.
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We’ve all heard tales of Amsterdam: the great European city of bacchanalia. Arriving by train, weary travellers walk along a canal that radiates outward from Centraal station and venture down any of the many narrow side streets that splay forth from each canal, leading to the city’s best-known attractions. From the live sex shows and scantily clad prostitutes of the red light district to the so-called “coffee shops” where modest portions of cannabis and hashish can be bought and smoked, the city’s core is brimming with a degree of naughtiness that comparatively puritan North Americans find jaw-dropping.Nevertheless, as any recent visitor can tell you, there’s something strange in the Amsterdam air these days — a distinctly different kind of stink than the acrid odour of an expertly rolled blunt. While the culture of permissiveness remains intact, it has been thoroughly rattled by a recent series of legal reforms. Nestled alongside policies that would see the red-light district scaled back by half, new rules designed to restrict the sale and consumption of soft drugs are on their way down the pipe; some have already arrived.
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