If you’ve been reading the news from Europe, you know things in Holland are going to pot – and not in the way you’d expect.

The Dutch are practical to a fault and have a healthy live-and-let-live attitude about things. For instance, prostitution is legal there, and if two people want to get married, it doesn’t matter if they’re Adam and Eve, or Adam and Steve. As long as it doesn’t interfere with commerce or scare the horses, the Dutch shrug their shoulders and mind their own business.

Given this loosey-goosey attitude, a couple of recent news items from the Netherlands are pretty surprising. Surprise number one: in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht, coffeeshops licensed to sell cannabis (or wacky tobaccky, as it is known to scientists) are going to have to start fingerprinting customers and scanning their IDs this summer to help prove they're following rules governing such sales.

This is confusing. Technically, cannabis is illegal in Holland. However, the Dutch, figuring they have better things to do than telling adults what they can and can’t smoke, tolerate the use and possession of small amounts of weed. But (and as someone said about Jennifer Lopez, that’s a big but) coffeeshops can sell only limited amounts, and they can sell only to adults.

In other words, there’s a legal limit to how much illegality the coffeeshops can indulge in. And if they go over the legal limit of illegality, they’ll get in legal trouble. I guess if you’ve been hanging in a coffeeshop, this makes sense; personally, it just makes my head hurt.

That’s right – in the shops beloved by Pink Floyd fans worldwide, toking up will soon be a no-no. Next July, all restaurants and cafes – including the coffeeshops in which the herb superb is attraction numero uno – will be smoke-free. You ask me, that’s like Lockhart banning brisket, or Fredericksburg saying nein to overpriced junk.

Unlike other countries, which ban pot smoking on the grounds that it’s simply too much fun, the ever-practical Dutch have turned on the no-smoking light for health reasons. Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said, "It would have been wrong to move towards a smoke-free catering industry and then make an exception for coffeeshops. People would not have understood that."

So, it’s technically illegal to grow or sell weed, but legal to buy it and smoke it, and the Dutch have no problem understanding that. But banning smoking in the shops where smoking is the main attraction – people won’t understand that? I don’t understand.

If the government is so concerned about peoples’ health, they ought to ban those wooden shoes the Dutch are famous for. Those things have to be the most dangerous footwear ever invented; they’re stiff, they’re slick, and they’re almost impossible to walk in – especially if you’ve been hanging in a coffeeshop.