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Monday, 25 May 2009 08:26 |
 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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Tuesday, 05 May 2009 09:48 |
Red lights still glow in the small rooms along one of Amsterdam's inner city alleys, but the some beds are gone and artists are working on creative installations where prostitutes used to entertain clients.
As part of efforts to revitalise its centre and rein in a mushrooming red light district, the city of Amsterdam in cooperation with a housing corporation has acquired some former brothel rooms and rented them out to artists as studios.
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Saturday, 06 December 2008 17:35 |
 Amsterdam authorities said on Saturday they would halve the number of brothels and marijuana shops in the city's "red light" district and surrounding area.
The city announced plans to clean up the area a year ago and since then 109 sex "windows", from which prostitutes attract customers, have been closed. The new measures aim to reduce the number of windows to 243 from 482 last year, a city spokesman said.
Amsterdam also wants to close half of the 76 cannabis shops in the city centre.
"Money laundering, extortion and human trafficking are things you do not see on the surface but they are hurting people and the city. We want to fight this," says the mayor.
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Saturday, 06 December 2008 00:00 |
 The Dutch government wants the 17th century canals at the heart of Amsterdam to be declared a UN World Heritage Site because of the district's cultural and historical significance, its culture ministry said. "The structure of canals, roads, bridges and land around the Singel, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsensgracht is an international icon of urban planning that is still intact after four centuries," the culture ministry said in a statement.
The four concentric semi-circles of canals are big draws for tourists, along with Amsterdam's red light district and marijuana-selling coffee shops. Boutiques, cafes, upmarket restaurants and handsome residences line the canals.
The government plans to put its case to the World Heritage Committee by February 2009. The Netherlands has seven listed World Heritage Sites, including a 19th-centuryfortification in Amsterdam and the country's oldest reclaimed area. |
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Monday, 17 November 2008 10:34 |
 Freddy Schaap, a grower of hallucinogenic mushrooms, is bitter about having to lay off half his staff on account of a Dutch government ban on his psychedelic produce."I will have to dismiss at least half of my 16 employees" when the ban on cultivating and selling the so-called magic mushrooms enters into force on December 1, Schaap told AFP on his farm in Tiel in the central Netherlands. McSmart, the business he created in 2000, produces some 25 tonnes a year of the substance known fondly by users as "shrooms" and in the Netherlands as "paddos". "The ban makes no sense," protests the 36-year-old entrepreneur, saying he felt angry and deceived. |
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