Drug-Sniffing Drones Take To the Skies In the Netherlands 229
Ryan writes "Unmanned, drug-sniffing drones have been introduced in the Netherlands. They fly over houses (video), sniff for weed, and scan for grow lights. Police say they are not breaking the law because the samples can be taken without entering the building."
Re:Um. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um. (Score:5, Informative)
I am not from Amsterdam but I have family there, so I am there fairly often, perhaps I can help.
Your question depends on your definition of 'quasi-legal'. Cannabis is *not* legal in Holland. However, they have made a decision not to prosecute small time offenders. This means, a blind eye is turned to possession when the amount is very low (personal use amounts). They also grant licenses to owners of 'coffee-shops' to sell cannabis with some fairly tight regulations. I believe the idea behind this is that, as has been discovered in basically every other country on earth, people want to smoke a joint from time to time, and it is better they get it from a regulated (and more importantly, taxed!) business, rather than some guy on the street who will almost certainly try to push the more addictive stuff on to the customer for higher (tax free!) profits.
However, what is not tolerated, is massive scale, cannabis farming which is then sold on for huge profits (without tax being paid, are you spotting a theme here??).
The Dutch are an eminently sensible race. Probably my favourite bunch of people. They are smart, direct (this comes across as rude at first, but once you get used to it, it's quite charming!), and very business minded. They actually are quite liberal, but they are also completely aware of how much extra gold goes in the coffers from all those tourists who you will see sparked out on a public bench at 10AM.
People will smoke weed, people will pay for sex, it simply cannot be prevented in any society that has the slightest freedom (or isn't batshit crazy religious!). The dutch say.... ok, get on with it, pay your taxes and don't make a nuisance of yourself and you are fine by us! I reiterate... eminently sensible!
Re:Um. (Score:5, Informative)
As I understand it the law allows one to possess mary jane, but growing it is illegal.
Yeah, it's like the prostitution laws in Canada; you can legally sell your body for sex, but it is illegal to advertise that you are willing to sell your body for sex. And so too medical marijuana is legal in Canada and yet people are (at least sometimes) arrested for growing medical marijuana, and after they win their court case the police refuse to compensate the victims.
This is another case of police fanaticism; they don't only want it to be illegal, but they will go out of their way to hunt you down for growing it, no matter how discrete the grower may attempt to be. I don't understand why the police would go out of their way to make portray themselves as evil.
Re:Um. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't see why it should be illegal to sell or use marijuana. It is a fairly harmless substance and is safer than most things found in the herbal supplement isle or on the shelves of GNC. It is certainly safer than anything on the over the counter medication shelf.
However, if you are going to make personal growing legal it shouldn't be based on the number of plants. The most sensible way to grow enough marijuana for personal use (about an ounce of bud per month per person) is to keep one mother plant that you take cuttings from and grow many smaller plants rather than a few big ones. Also you would have some plants in the flowering stage which requires 12light/12dark light cycle and another set going at the same time on vegatative light cycle. In a cabinet the size of a wardrobe you might have as many as 20-40 plants that will yield only enough to keep one person in smoke. You will need more if you want to people to be able to eat or vaporize instead of smoking.
'The average grower is not looking to increase addictive properties.'
Marijuana doesn't have addictive properties to increase. You would actually have to add a foreign substance to it in order to make it addictive.
Re:Um. (Score:3, Informative)
Would the locals care to elaborate on the incongruity of thought that I am currently experiencing?
Personally I'm far more interested in a different incongruity:
When new technology is made available to people, laws like CALEA (Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, in the US) require that any new tech must be hobbled with requirements that allow the bastard cops to e.g. have routers required to be made with LE-available backdoors and wiretappingg capability.
Meanwhile, when the sonofabitch government comes up with new intrusion technology, there is no requirement that the people's right to privacy be similarly expanded to thwart the new tech.
All we hear in such cases is shrieks of, "You have no expectation of privacy in a public place", which the cocksucking courts have narrowed down to little more than being in your bathroom in your own home, with the door locked. It's a goddamned wonder they haven't limited you to one flush per hour, in case you're trying to keep them from snooping on a potential illicit conversation in there.
Thank you Larry Fucking Ellison. You came up with your mantra, "There's no such thing as privacy any more -- get used to it" just so you could sell more goddamned Oracle databases to the "data aggregators". Their capability far exceeds Stalin's wettest dreams. To the white-hot pit of hell with you.
Re:Um. (Score:4, Informative)
To avoid detection they normally tap illegal electricity for the necessary lamps.
Well, we're about to get a dose of Dutch-style snooping (without going inside the house) here in the San Francisco bay area.
Pacific Gas & Electric is in the process of "upgrading" us with new "smart meters" that wirelessly report your usage of gas and electricity every fifteen minutes. (Great chance to fire some more union scum (in management's eyes) meter readers, too.)
It won't be in effect for an hour before the fucking SFPD and the rest of the local yokels are hammering on the power company's doors demanding a "feed" from the accounting process so they can pore over the stats looking for instances of "potential unauthorized indoor agriculture".
Warrant, my ass. All they have to do is tout it as "a valuable crime-fighting tool" and the courts will roll backwards and spread their legs again. Like the whores they've always been.
Re:Um. (Score:5, Informative)
5 plants in a household, to my knowledge.
As to the legality of growing weed, one of the big issues is that people do it in attics, connecting several megawatts worth of electrical equipment in really haphazard ways, often bypassing the electrical meter. This in turn is a massive fire hazard.
In the winter it's pretty easy to spot the growers though. If all the roofs in a street are covered with snow except for one, it might be time to get a warrant(or send this toy for a flyby).
Re:News just in. (Score:5, Informative)
Heh this fight has been going on for years.
Weed is still illegal here. We have a "gedoogbeleid"... basically you can have 5 grams of weed and it'll be tolerated. Growing 5 plants for your own consumption is allowed BUT: outdoors, without lamps and so on. How you can harvest 5 plants without having more than 5 grams... I have no idea... you can grow HUGE plants outdoors if you trim them right ;-) The weed is nowhere near indoor quality though. There's some variants that'll grow fine in our climate but the buds just aren't that great.
So... I can smoke, I can buy it in a coffeeshop... but the coffeeshop isn't allowed to buy it from a grower. Heh. That's still illegal trade.
I grew 10 plants on my attic for a while. Went really nice. If you want to do it right it takes a lot of learning and equipment. It's also a chore, you need to give them water at very specific times. I used a 600 watt and a 400 watt lamp. When they turn on the plants get thirsty. I kept 100 grams for myself and sold like 600 to a guy owning a coffeeshop.
So what I did was illegal and would have been prosecuted if they cared to. I usually started out with 18 cuttings, while having space for 10 plants. So I threw out the 8 worst to get more grams for the wattage ;-) It was indoors, using 2 lamps, chains and pulleys to raise them, a fan to move air around, a heater, floor isolation in the winter (the concrete got too cold), an exhaust fan pushing air through the chimney, a GOOD timer (with a relay), a water vaporizer (to grow the cuttings) an air dehumidifier (really hate mold), and very specific nutrients, boosters and enzymes.
I can honestly say it was better weed then the best I've ever bought in a coffeeshop.
If I was caught and punished... first the police would probably contract someone to remove my installation and send me a bill for it. With 2 lamps and 10 plants that's not a huge bill. Then I'd probably get 20-40 hours doing community service. And then... here's the real bitch... they're gonna estimate how much profit you've had, and "take it away from you"... in other words, you'll have a nice debt to the government.
The more plants you have, the higher the probability you get caught (more hassle, more people involved, more smell), and the higher your sentences will be.
The police here isn't really after someone like me. It was a small installation, I did it in a sensible way, on my own, using good equipment, safely installed, absolutely no fire hazard. They're after criminal organizations who get people to turn half their house into a greenery for a small share of the profit. The larger it gets, the easier it goes wrong. One place burnt down completely even though good equipment was used. A big fat cable got stuck under a door, bent, got hot, hotter, and so on. People die in these accidents. Fire deaths are horrible.
These criminal gangs also cause trouble like gun violence. And a lot of trouble with countries surrounding us. Our weed is now a 2 billion export market (nice for a country with like 16 million people)... There have been shortages in our coffeeshop because too much of the grass was exported! Cities like Maastricht (close to Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg) really do have a lot of trouble with streams of people just coming there to buy grass. There's a lot of growing going on there too, causing a lot of trouble, wrecked homes, fires, and so on.
The solution is... LEGALIZE AND REGULATE... just like alcohol... so growing weed can become a business like any other and doesn't need to be hidden on attics! So the coffeeshop can buy their weed, now of controlled quality, legally and the government get those taxes too!
But oh, these international treaties... right...
Re:Um. (Score:1, Informative)
I think is simplistic to say cannabis isn't addictive, in fact its simplistic to say that cannabis is cannabis. There are various major and minor landrace species the major being indica and sativa. The effects of the indica are narcotic and addictive. In certain areas of Thailand its been known for the locals to warn against smoking the local wild species because "it will make you go mad" and then go on to recommend the tourist go to the next valley if they want good quality and thats a sativa area.. (it might just be a polite way to run the hippies out town however).
Some background (Score:5, Informative)
Using cannabis is considered a victimless crime and thus low priority for law enforcement. This is true for most countries in Europe, but the Netherlands is known for this because it's in the open. So, yes, it's tolerated, but this is far from unique and has little to do with government income from taxes, as someone on this thread suggested.
The national laws regarding drugs are somewhat hazy (the same with squatting). This is intentional, it gives city councils room to adapt their policies to the local situation. Some cities on the borders get thousands of drug tourists a day, which creates all kinds of problems. Maastricht has banned its coffeeshops to a `drug boulevard' outside the city, other places work with a pass system so that only locals can visit coffeeshops. Most other places don't experience such problems, so do not need such measures.
However, things have changed in the last decade. Modern designer plants literally drip with THC, the content of some weed is actually so high that it is considered hallucinogenic and thus a hard drug. Also, the growers are not old ladies or hippies anymore. It's now big business run by criminal gangs that grow for export, not just local use.
These are reasons for the police to crack down on the growers. It's also part of a political trend, the current coalition includes two christian parties. They are the parties responsible for the Netherlands joining Bush's wars. The former minister for science belongs to one of them, she kept telling universities they should look into ID, so they're quite extreme. Both parties spout rethoric about moral reconstruction of the country, they're also pushing for stiff jail sentences for squatters. City councils are against this, they tolerate squatters to make life difficult for real-estate speculators.
Concerning the drone, the police says they'll only use it if they suspect the presence of a cannabis farm. Maybe they get tipped of by electricity companies (growers rig their meters). What worries me far more than this silly drone, which seems to be mainly a deterrent, is a proposed law concerning smart meters. The ID woman is now minister of economy, and she's trying to make smart meters obligatory. Refusing to have them installed would be an economic crime, which implies high fines and even jail.
These meters send data about your minute-to-minute electricity use over the interwebtubes to your energy company, they in turn provide records to government upon request. So it just comes down to government spying, and since the meters have been hacked already, it means criminals can spy on you as well. They can then burgle your house while you're on holiday, so as not to inconvenience you too much. So it's a win-win situation. The motivation for this bill is that it will help consumers to be more energy efficient.
Most. Transparent. Excuse. Ever.
Re:Question for you Dutch. (Score:2, Informative)
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four [wikipedia.org]
Re:Um. (Score:4, Informative)
I think the point is that if you let Big Tobacco sell the stuff, they'd sell pre-rolled spliffs that contained tobacco/nicotine - and the end result would be addictive in the sense that conventional cigarettes are addictive.
Some random facts about MJ in Holland (Score:2, Informative)
- There are hundreds, thousands of "coffeeshops" all over Holland, where everyone over 18 is allowed to buy as much as 5 grammes hash or weed;
- As a result, selling weed is legal for coffeeshops;
- The same coffeeshops are not allowed to sell alcohol;
- Smoking tobacco is not allowed in coffeeshops, however, smoking pure hash/weed is okay. No one cares.
- The coffeeshops are *not* allowed to buy weed/hash from growers (so technically, they have to commit crimes on a daily basis to be able to stay in business)
- The police will look the other way for this so it's only illegal on paper.
- On the other hand, growing weed is prohibited, and police are actively looking for plantations, and prosecuting the owners;
- But: it is legal for anyone to grow up to 4 plants in their home, "for personal use". You cannot sell any of that.
- The dutch take pride in this confusing, schizofrenic mess, calling it "tolerant".
Yes, we're a crazy lot.
Re:Um. (Score:3, Informative)
And it's debatable how harmful the majority of recreational drugs really are, if used in safe, known doses of unadulterated quality. Yes, even cocaine, crack, and meth. Most people will not overuse these substances, which can be shown through the vast differences in rates for lifetime use of the drug, vs. past month use. These figures can be had here [samhsa.gov].
These figures show quite clearly that the vast majority of meth, cocaine, and heroin users try it, maybe use it for a while, and quit. That's a bit of a different picture than what the ONDCP tries to paint.
Re:Um. (Score:3, Informative)