Door Sabine Fiedler

Het kopen van cannabis in de Nederlandse stad van Maastricht zal spoedig betekenen hebbend uw genomen vingerafdrukken, uw afgetast gezicht en uw biometrische geregistreerde gegevens.

Alle 15 koffiewinkels in de zuidelijke stad besteden ongeveer 100.000 euro (67.000 ponden) installerend een veiligheidssysteem dat het harder voor een under-age cannabisroker maakt dan een terrorist om voet in Europa, volgens Marc Josemans, hoofd van de lokale unie van de koffiewinkel in te gaan te plaatsen.

„Wij zijn beschaamd voor deze aanval op uw privacy“, lezen een verklarend pamflet over het systeem dat in September begint.

The coffee shops face a continual struggle to prove they are not selling to people under the age of 18 or more than 5 grams of cannabis a day to any one individual.

If they can’t, they risk being shut down.

“If a 17-year-old comes here, shows the ID of his very similar-looking older brother and then gets caught by the police with cannabis bought in our shop, we have to prove that he broke the rules, not us,” said Josemans.

Cannabis is theoretically illegal in the Netherlands but has been tolerated in small amounts since the 1970s.

Customers in Maastricht will have their fingers and face scanned. The scans will be compared with stored data and, if everything matches, they will be able to enter the coffee shop.

No names and addresses are stored and details on the amount of cannabis bought every day will be saved only until midnight.

The information is completely secure, coffee shop owners say. But Josemans concedes 90 percent of his clients don’t like the system and he expects the new measures to hurt sales initially.

“I don’t like them registering what you buy, it’s too much Big Brother”, says Barry, 34. “But a fingerprint is okay.”

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