I am 31 years old right now, and since I can remember, cannabis was always negative in the news. Here in The Netherlands, at a certain point around the year 2000, the Christian political parties came to power, and they had bad news for everybody who shares a warm love for the cannabis plant. They tried to ban cannabis completely in The Netherlands. In my last writing, I told you guys about Louk Hulsman, a highly respected professor who in the 70’s somehow ”legalized” cannabis in this small country in West-Europe. Till this day going Holland is still the only country to have a form of legal cannabis in all of Europe.

Banning the cannabis failed big time, because street dealing found his way back into the big cities, with a lot of big-time conflicts (shootings) being settled in the middle of the street. As many of you know, The Netherlands (Amsterdam) became very popular for its famous drug policy. People from all over the world would come here just to smoke up, and still, a lot of people do.

Quickly the Dutch Christian government that was running at the time saw that banning cannabis was impossible. Still, they tried to do their best as more and more insane laws were being pushed. One of them is a special pass that you need to buy cannabis here. It turned a lot of people off and more people started searching for their cannabis on the street. No government official was interested in cannabis here in The Netherlands. That changed when the numbers of cannabis in The Netherlands came out. Now the government is all over the business part of what they call ”The Green Gold”.

When there is money to be made, you can patiently wait till the wolves come and try to have a piece of it. Right now (January 2020), Holland is going to have a small test with legal cannabis being grown for recreational purposes. It is almost impossible to get a license for this, just like in Canada, where all these licenses are built for big corporations. First, they called it garbage, now they want in on the whole deal. Even the people who demonized and destroyed cannabis consumers, now are trying to become the company that is going to sell you your cannabis. Corruption is a big problem with the power structures that we have today.

The biggest problem for the Dutch people is an even bigger one. Law-enforcement is acting rough on people who try to grow their own. Someone needs to put a stop to this as soon as possible. It’s a tough pill to swallow for people who have been doing everything they can to legalize cannabis. But for now, it seems, that none of these people will ever get a chance to be active in this branch.

The future of cannabis remains to be uncertain, with only a couple of countries being busy legalizing it. The big question is: why aren’t more countries working on this? To earn the most money and to keep putting people in jail, it is the best thing to keep this harmless plant illegal. That is the reality where we are all living in. The way I see it, this will not get any better soon, with Holland being my main concern.