California’s reputation as a place where trends are set may have been undermined when voters there decided against legalizing marijuana for recreational use earlier this month.

Though Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger reduced the penalty for possessing small amounts to the level of a traffic ticket in early October, it appears California residents were not ready to be the first state in America to put cannabis on par with alcohol or tobacco, and tax an industry some estimate is worth billions.

Of course, medical marijuana dispensaries have proliferated in California, as they have in states like Montana and Colorado where use of the drug is legal for health purposes. There are some unanticipated benefits from the growing market, The Times reported. American newspapers ? particularly alternative weeklies ? are gaining a new stream of revenue from ads for medical marijuana providers and the businesses that have sprouted up to service them - tax lawyers, real estate agents, security specialists.

The ads are filling up papers in large metropolitan news markets like Los Angeles, San Francisco and Denver, and are a welcome boost in an industry that has seen nothing but declining advertising and circulation revenue for the better part of the last decade.

“Medical marijuana has been a revenue blessing over and above what we anticipated,” John Weiss, the founder and publisher of The Independent, a free weekly in Colorado Springs, told The Times. “This wasn’t in our marketing plan a year ago, and now it is about 10 percent of our paper’s revenue.”

The news is darker in the Netherlands, where its longtime tolerance toward the sale of so-called soft drugs is attracting a less benign element. Maastricht, near the German and Belgian borders, sees thousands of “drug tourists” every day ? as many as two million a year, city officials say. Their sole purpose is to visit the city’s 13 “coffee shops,” where they can buy pot legally, The Times reported.

It is an attraction Maastricht and other Dutch border cities would now gladly do without. Maastricht now has a crime rate three times that of similar-size Dutch cities farther from the border. “They come with their cars and they make a lot of noise and so on,” Gerd Leers, who was mayor of Maastricht for eight years, told The Times.

“But the worst part is that this group, this enormous group, is such an attractive target for criminals who want to sell their own stuff, hard stuff, and they are here too now.’’ The city is pushing to make its legalized use of recreational drugs a Dutch-only policy, banning sales to foreigners who visit just to get high, though it faces a challenge in the European Union court.

Polls show most Dutch still believe that the coffee shops should exist. But the Netherlands once had 1,500 of them; now, there are about 700, reported The Times. But in places like Nederland, Colorado, about 20 kilometers west of the liberal college town of Boulder, some folks feel like they are finally able to cash in on a trade that has long lived underground.

“It’s been here, probably in an illegal capacity, for a long time, but now there’s an opportunity for industry,” said Nederland’s mayor, Sumaya Abu-Haidar. “There’s an opportunity for free enterprise, an opportunity for people to make a living in a way that wasn’t available before.”


TOM BRADY