I will miss the “Febo’s”

yes there is a% of women that are forced into prostitution, closing windows will only drive that part of the sextrade deeper into the shadows, make it even more difficult to help these women, but for politicians a invisible problem is no problem. As to the organized crimepart, sure there is that (the strange thing is that the fact that people like the hells angels have had control over parts of the wallen has also detered other criminals like pickpockets, as they deal out a different kind of justice)

The problem here is that the city is using the same methods owners are more or less extorted into selling their property by threat , not the way a government should act.

Finally, as hard as it is to say (i’m from rotterdam and we have as much problems with that as a red sox fan with the yankees) it is a strange area that somehow works. 10 years ago every bridge had groups of afrikans asking if you wanted to buy heroine of cocaine, they got rid of that, good. What was left is an oddity, you see americans wearing shorts, brits in football shirts (drunk as usual) groups of japanese following a tourguide all with (semi) naked women in the background, somehow it works, so why mess with it.

The people that used to live there liked it that way, the problems only came when people started to pay $$$$ for houses and see even more $$$$ if it is changed into a monument.

For fun go to hamburg
for shopping to dortmund, antwerp etc.

forget about amsterdam it is a piece of historie

The bill to shut down the Smart Shop sales of “magic mushrooms” was passed by the Dutch Parliament and is a national ban, not a local one. It is completely separate from the new crack down by the Amsterdam government itself on the drug and sex trades. I brought up the mushroom ban, because that adds to the changes the Amsterdam government is making in their City.

It turns out that Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen in an open letter urged Health minister Ab Klink to treat Amsterdam as a special case under this law saying he noted “that an overwhelming proportion of all problematic cases involved young, international tourists and took place in the country’s capital city. In many of these instances, the patient had consumed multiple substances, particularly alcohol and marijuana.”

Under Minister Klink’s urging, no exceptions to the new national ban of on the sale of fresh hallucinogenic ‘magic’ mushrooms were written into the law which went into effect in the Netherlands on December 1, 2008. In dried form the mushrooms already were banned under Dutch Opiate Laws.

As I mentioned, the primary impetus of closing all but 30 of the “coffee houses” where you can smoke marijuana is to drive organized crime out of Amsterdam.

From what I’ve read in newspapers and news sites on the Internet, plus what I heard from locals during my trip to Amsterdam last winter, organized crime, heavily involved in the drug and sex trade in Amsterdam, is a major problem and getting worse.

There will still be brothels and “coffee houses” in Amsterdam, but they will be far fewer in number, and far more highly regulated than they are at this time, and the brothels in particular will be allowed only in controlled areas of the City.

It seems very clear to me, by the way, that the residents of Amsterdam overwhelmingly support this new plan by the Mayor and Alderman.