With thousands of visitors a day it was the biggest cannabis selling coffee shop in the Netherlands and, by definition, the world. A court has now ruled that it was run by a professional criminal organisation.

 
The man in charge of running the Checkpoint coffee shop, in the southern Dutch town of Terneuzen, has been ordered to pay back almost 10 million euros in profits to the government. He was also sentenced to 16 weeks behind bars. 
 
The ruling could have major consequences for the famous Dutch policy of tolerance towards the use and sale of cannabis products. 
 
Regardless of whether the Dutch take pride in it or not, the Netherlands' cannabis-selling "coffee shops" are a major tourist attraction. The country is known worldwide for its policy of tolerance towards soft drugs.
 
Technically all of this is illegal but, in practice, no action is taken as long as users and coffee shops play by the rules. Users are allowed to have a few grams in their possession and coffee shops a supply of no more than 500 grams.
 
However, the public prosecutor explains how different things were at Checkpoint, the former giant among coffee shops:
 
"In short, a well-oiled machinery was ready at the back door to sell the largest possible quantity of drugs. Many dozens of kilograms a day. Each member of the team had a separate role to play. The team included a purchasing department, a transport department and a processing department. We regard that as a criminal organisation, because crimes were committed. The volume of drugs being sold there was absurd, annual turnover was nearly 30 million euros."
 
Checkpoint had five different sales counters, and yet on busy days there was a queue of more than 300 customers. As many as 90 percent of them came from neighbouring Belgium and even from France. The international character of the coffee shop is exactly what the local council never wanted to happen. Checkpoint was no longer a small-scale 'drug store' but rather a criminal organisation exporting drugs on a large scale, laundering money and with much too many drugs on the premises.
 
The case against Checkpoint could have consequences for Dutch soft drug policies. According to legal expert Peter Tak:
 
"The ruling has consequences for all big coffee shops in the Netherlands, and there are quite a few of them. The Public Prosecutors' Office could use the ruling to crack down on them, but I doubt whether it would know where to start. Because Checkpoint was one of a kind. An excess."
 
The authorities want more attention paid to the growers, the coffee shops' suppliers. Police Chief Max Daniel spends most of his days chasing cannabis growers. Here's what he has to say:
 
"Suppose all the cannabis plants grown in the Netherlands were planted together, the resulting field would be as big as the province of Utrecht, about 1,500 square kilometres. Some plants are hidden in attics or in cornfields. Sometimes they are even underground in transport containers which are nearly impossible to discover."
 
The police chief is worried about the role of serious crime in cannabis cultivation:
 
"Everybody's going 'oh, its just a couple of cannabis plants in the window. They must be old hippies.' This is a complete misunderstanding. Eighty percent of production is intended for export, which is a multi-billion euro business. Unreliable partners have their fingers cut off and competitors or snitches are shot dead in broad daylight. And yet the popular image of cannabis is still: 'oh, that cute little plant.' That image has proved impossible to change".  
 
In total sixteen suspects were on trial in the Checkpoint case, but none of them will end up behind bars - the owner of the coffee shop was the only one to receive a custodial sentence, 16 weeks, but he has already been in jail longer than that in the run-up to the trial.
 
The sentences in the case were light as the court ruled that the local council had helped facilitate the coffee shop  - it moved what was a small coffee shop in the middle of the town to a new site on the outskirts with ample parking and that's when it became an international attraction. The coffee shop was closed last year after police raids.