C’est fini: no more cross-border drug buying
Next Monday is the premiere of the film ‘C’est Fini’ (It’s over’) in Antwerp, Belgium, a comedy film made by the Dutch cities of Roosendaal and Bergen op Zoom near the Belgian border to inform drug tourists about not being able to buy drugs anymore in both cities.
As of tomorrow, coffeeshops in both cities will no longer be allowed to sell soft drugs (hashish and marijuana). Coffeeshops that do sells drugs will be shut down for five years after a first warning. About 90% of all the drugs sold in these cities are to Flemish youth, which adds up to some 25,000 drug tourists.
The film’s plot has three Flemish guys trying to score a joint in the Netherlands. You can catch the trailer here (warning, nasty splash page).
The Dutch could just stop selling soft drugs altogether, some do say, others think that it’s still better to be relaxed about soft drugs in order to dissuade people from taking hard drugs. The current trend is that most people would probably not have the Netherlands known as some sort of coffeeshop and prostituion heaven, but hey, it’s part of the country’s identity at this point and it does attract the right tourists in some places. The jury is defintely still out on this, so to speak.
And don’t ask me why the poster has three languages on it (English = cool, French = cool to the Flemish, Dutch/Flemish = to be understood).
(Link: parool.nl, cestfini.be)
Niet belangrijk, maar it’s “hashish” or just “hash” in English, no C’s.
I’ve never been able to understand the fascination with English. Even on Taalmeesters (a Dutch TV quiz show testing your knowledge of Dutch) the presenters fall back to cool English sayings. Weird.
Here I was trying to spell it all cool. Thanks.
For more weird Dunglish sayings, check out http://www.dunglish.nl (run by yours truly)