This year's Club Health conference will be hosted in The Netherlands. Coffeeshops are part of the Dutch Nightlife and recreational settings and attract many international visitors. The tolerance policy towards cannabis is a unique and interesting approach, which comes with its own specific challenges. Currently, the Dutch government is to press ahead with experiments in regulated marijuana production involving 10 licensed growers. But the plans to date have been criticized by the Dutch local authorities association VNG, drugs and legal experts and coffee shop owners.

We have invited Dirk Korf, a professor in Criminology at the University of Amsterdam, to explore the challenges related to the Dutch cannabis policy, the coffee shops and the tourists they attract. 

His main fields of research are patterns and trends in drug use and drug trafficking, violence, and crime and crime prevention. He is particularly interested in the balance between pleasures and problems of drug use, the role of formal and informal social control in drug use, and the link between criminalization, decriminalization, legalization and drug markets. He has published numerous papers, reports and books on these issues, and is chair of the European Society for Social Drug Research (ESSD) and member of the Scientific Committee of EMCDDA. 

You can find out more about the experiment here...

More info on our invited speakers...

Registration for the conference...