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Sad Robot Bureau: What Detroit Can Learn From Amsterdam

My first job out of school had me spending one week out of every month in Detroit, Michigan.  And that is one of the major reasons I don’t have that job anymore.  The decline of one of America’s great cities is hard to make funny, but if you’ve ever spent time there, as I have, you can’t be blamed if the shock of it makes you laugh as the blight of the city is so incongruent with the rest of America.

Here’s some trivia to help you get the idea.  Can you guess the number of chain grocery stores within the city limits of Detroit?  The answer is zero.  Not one.  Don’t believe me? Look it up, you’re already on the internet. This has made it nearly impossible for residents to find fresh produce and made artery clogging fast food one of the only thriving industries in the state.  To counter this, communities have begun turning Detroit’s all too many vacant lots into urban vegetable gardens. Adding insult is the fact that the soil in the city is so toxic after years of industrial pollution, they have to import top soil from Illinois to make the food safe to eat.

I left that job feeling the problems in Detroit were unsolvable. That we should just wall it off and force Canada to annex the whole state. That is, until I visited another city that you have to see to believe, Amsterdam.  A city where the party never stops and where red lights mean 50 euro will buy you 15 minutes of pretty much whatever you want. Where you can’t smoke a cigarette in a bar, that is, unless there’s weed in it.   Before I got there I thought I knew, but I had no idea.   With all the craziness and excess around me, I could not believe how any work could possibly get done here!

After speaking to the Dutch it all began to make sense, too much sense.   They told me that the pot, the prostitution, the outdoor urinals for when you’ve had too much to drink were not there for them.  They were there for me.   They’re for the tourists, tourists who bring in hundreds of millions of dollars into the country every year.  If there’s one thing the Dutch will readily admit they’re good at, it’s making money.  They are the founders of the world’s first corporation, the Dutch East India Company.   Behind the scenes, this chaos is very well orchestrated.  Sex worker and coffee shop licenses (essentially a license to sell pot) are extremely hard to obtain and are very, very expensive.   And the taxes on marijuana and even alcohol or hotel rooms are as high as anywhere in the world.  Yet the tourists still come and they still spend.  This might seem at odds with Holland’s Calvinist history, but for them it isn’t.  The oldest Church in Amsterdam is right in the middle of the Red Light District and one did not grow around the other.  They were built at the same time 700 years ago.

Marijuana isn’t technically legal in Amsterdam, but the courts refuse to prosecute it.  This frees up vast amounts of the police department’s budget to combat harder and infinitely more harmful drugs… the same drugs Detroit is fighting a losing battle against.  Can you imagine the droves of teenagers and college students that would come from Chicago and Milwaukee and New York and a thousand other cities that would flood the city on day trips if Detroit followed Amsterdam’s model?  Can you imagine the money that they would bring with them?  Money the city and people of Detroit so desperately need.  It’s a chance to renew America’s forgotten metropolis, and I for one would smoke to that.

Michael Winand