The EU’s laws make it difficult for any member country to legalize recreational weed. But Germany and the Netherlands are finally starting to push back.
To the outside observer, Amsterdam seems like a weed-lovers’ paradise—a city where people can hang out in the haze of its iconic coffee shops, sharing joints or snacking on space cakes in a nation that appears to have perfected a vibrant cannabis-tolerant community with no side effects.
But that’s far from true. Though revolutionary when it started 50 years ago, the Dutch cannabis model has been riddled with problems—not the least of which is that selling marijuana in its coffee shops isn’t actually legal under EU law. That’s created a black market for growing and distributing it, which has led to a rise in organized crime. There have been widespread calls to fix the system, but so far little has been done.
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