22/06/2007 00:00:00
Netherlands: Dutch cannabis buyers to be fingerprinted and have faces
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BUYING cannabis in the Dutch city of Maastricht will soon mean having
your fingerprints taken, your face scanned and your biometric data recorded.
The 15 coffee shops in the city are spending about 100,000 (£67,000) on
a security system.
Marc Josemans, head of the local coffee shop union, said it would be
harder for under-age cannabis smokers to get into their shops than for a
terrorist to get into Europe. "We are ashamed for this attack on your
privacy", an explanatory leaflet tells customers.
The coffee shops face a continual struggle to prove they are not selling
to people under the age of 18 or selling more than five grams of
cannabis a day to any one individual. If they can't, they risk being
shut down.
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 of the amount of cannabis
bought every day will be saved only until midnight. The information is
completely secure, coffee shop owners say. But Mr Josemans concedes that
90 per cent of his clients don't like the system and he expects the new
measures to hurt sales initially.
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=975502007
Source:
http://www.ukcia.org/news/shownewsarticle.php?articleid=12635
Author:
The Scotsman via UKCIA
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