Smart Shops in Dutch Law
Legally, smart shops operate under a decision of the Hoge Raad (Supreme Court) that has declared that unprepared mushrooms and cacti are not considered "preparations" of the substances they contain, and are therefore not banned under the Opium Act or international law even if their active ingredients are.
As of December 1 2008, the sale of magic mushrooms was subject to tighter control in the Netherlands.
This legal regime is markedly different from the one that applies to cannabis products. Those are formally illegal under the Opium Act and international law, which after all explicitly bans the plant rather than the cannabinoids in it. Cannabis products such as marijuana and hashish can be sold and possessed only pursuant to a web of executive orders more-or-less silently assented to by parliament. The sale of magic mushrooms, on the other hand, was entirely legal and subject only to the common regulation of foodstuffs by the Warenautoriteit (Commodities Authority).
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Famous quotes containing the words smart, shops, dutch and/or law:
“I’m a very smart guy. I haven’t a feeling or a scruple in the world. All I have the itch for is money. I am so money greedy that for twenty-five bucks a day and expenses, mostly gasoline and whisky, I do my thinking myself, what there is of it; I risk my whole future, the hatred of the cops ... I dodge bullets and eat saps, and say thank you very much, if you have any more trouble, I hope you’ll think of me, I’ll just leave one of my cards in case anything comes up.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some rust,... confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, aye, and years almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,—sitting there now at three o’clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o’clock in the morning.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Paradise endangered: garden snakes and mice are appearing in the shadowy corners of Dutch Old Master paintings.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The greatest step forward would be to see that everything factual is already theory. The blueness of the sky reveals the basic law of chromatics. Don’t look for anything behind the phenomena, they themselves are the doctrine.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)