The Irony of Holland’s Smoking Ban: You can Still Have Your Joint, but Only if it’s Pure – International – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News
In July, the Dutch government will introduce a nationwide smoking ban in bars, cafes and restaurants, aimed at protecting workers. But it will also make life a lot harder for the country’s infamous coffee shops, where customers will only be allowed to smoke pure cannabis.…Dutch Health Minister Ab Klink has no plans to make any exceptions. Coffee shop employees, he argues, also have the right to protection from tobacco smoke.But [a coffee shop owner] claims it’s a specious argument. After all, people who apply for jobs in a coffee shop know that smoking is the company’s core business. “If the boys are old enough to be sent to Afghanistan, then you can’t tell me that people want to protect them from smoke in the workplace. They’re old enough to decide on their own. They can vote, they can go to war — but now they won’t even be allowed to make this decision?”
Perversely, the law, intended to protect workers from smoke, only applies to tobacco. In the Netherlands, that has resulted in a rather bizarre result: Smoking pot or hashish in coffee shops will remain legal; it just can’t be mixed with tobacco. If someone wants to roll their joint with tobacco, then they have to smoke it outside….
Besides, it will be difficult to monitor whether someone has secretly rolled his joint with tobacco or not. [Another coffee shop owner] feels the world has been turned on its head in Holland. “In every other country they do just the opposite — there they check whether there is cannabis inside,” he says with a laugh.
There are exceptions to the ban. If an establishment can set up a separate room or add a glass partition to ensure that employees are not exposed to tobacco smoke, then smoking is permitted in those rooms as long as service is not provided.
It’s also possible that officials will place a low priority on policing the smoking ban in coffee shops and, in a typically Dutch fashion, a situation would be created in which smoking would be officially banned but still tolerated.
I’ve always been leery of the indoor tobacco smoking bans being promulgated in the US and around the world. I was a musician for many years and would have loved to have sung in a smoke-free room. I get the point about employees not being subject to dangerous secondhand smoke.
On the other hand, some jobs have risks. We still let men go into the bowels of the earth and mine coal for thirty years and they’re breathing far worse air than a part-time server would at a smoky tavern.
I can see banning smoking in public buildings, but I wouldn’t have banned smoking from bars (or in this case, coffee houses.) Instead, I would tell workers that they have the choice whether they wish to work in an environment with dangerous air, but I’d also tell the management that they must cover at 100% any health care costs of their workers (that’s a US argument, obviously, since the rest of the world has some form of national health care.) You’d see these business owners doing what they could to provide cleaner air, whether that was air scrubbers or banning smoking.
