Smart Shops Outside The Netherlands
Smart shop is distinguished from head shops found in many countries. Head shops provide only paraphernalia, whereas smart shops usually sell at least some actual drugs. The term head shop is more common in the UK, though many British head shops sold magic mushrooms until July 2005 when the Government introduced a complete ban on magic mushrooms, putting them in the same category as heroin and crack cocaine. Many of the British head shops still sell a range of other legal highs.
In the Republic of Ireland, there has been a recent rise in the number of smart shops within major cities. As with UK based head shops mentioned above, both paraphernalia and "legal highs" are available from these stores, such as Salvia Divinorum and BZP based products designed to simulate illegal drug highs such as those experienced through the use of amphetamines, methamphetamines, and psychedelics . Magic mushrooms were available until the government closed a loophole, effectively banning the sale of raw or prepared magic mushrooms in January 2006. BZP is now illegal in the Republic of Ireland.
In Portugal the drug laws are very liberal, and several Smartshops have opened in the last year. A chain store, called Magic Mushroom, emerged as the market leader. Shops in Portugal still sell all type of Herbal incense and Plantfeeders.
There are some shops from the Netherlands that operate as both a smart shop and a head shop on an International level. Customers are expected to accept the responsibility to inform themselves about the local laws, import and custom regulations before ordering and to certify that the import to their country of the products ordered is legal.
Read more about this topic: Smart Shop
Famous quotes containing the words smart, shops and/or netherlands:
“I never met anyone who didn’t have a very smart child. What happens to these children, you wonder, when they reach adulthood?”
—Fran Lebowitz (20th century)
“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)
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)