Marijuana shops in Maastricht to demand fingerprints from customers

Coffee shops licensed to sell marijuana in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht will begin fingerprinting customers and scanning their IDs this summer to help prove they‘re following rules governing such sales.

“This is not something that we are doing willingly, but with pain in our hearts,” Marc Josemans, chairman of the Union of Maastricht‘s Coffee Shops, said Wednesday. He said shops in Rotterdam and several Dutch border cities were considering following suit.

Marijuana is technically illegal in the Netherlands, but cities may license shops to sell no more than 5 grams per customer per day. The shops may not sell to anyone under 18, nor permit drugs other than marijuana or hashish on the premises.

As a result, 11 of Maastricht‘s 26 licensed shops have been closed, leaving just 15 open.

“We‘re not going to give this information to anybody else, and we‘re not linked to each other or the Internet,” Josemans said.

He said the shops already have video surveillance cameras and cooperate with police in criminal investigations, but the stored fingerprints would be too low in quality for use by police.

City spokesman Math Wijnands said the drug trade brought a host of problems, most notably petty criminals who seek to sell marijuana or other drugs in the neighborhood of the licensed coffee shops.

The city is negotiating to move more than half of the remaining shops to the outskirts of town — angering neighboring countries like Belgium who object to having what amount to marijuana drive-through stores on their doorsteps.

“If they‘re going to take ID checks into their own hands and obey the rules as much as possible, then that‘s only to be applauded,” he said.

Josemans said the system had been vetted with the Netherlands‘ digital privacy watchdog, known by its Dutch acronym CBP, and did not violate any laws. A CBP spokeswoman could not immediately confirm that.

Source: AP via International Herald Tribune, 30 May 2007