The Dutch city of Maastricht is fighting a sort of border war with its neighbors over a plan to push its marijuana "coffee shops" out of the city center and toward the city limits, Reuters reported April 20.

The city is trying to force the shops to three designated "coffee corners" near its municipal borders, where they would serve up to 2 million visitors who visit the city annually -- mostly from Belgium, France and Germany -- to legally purchase and smoke marijuana. But the plan has met strong resistance from neighboring cities in the Netherlands and Belgium.

"We see reckless driving, car theft ... We already have the highest level of crime of any countryside district in Belgium and 95 percent of it is due to drugs," said Huub Broers, mayor of the nearby Belgian district of Voeren.

Even critics broadly agree that the shops and their customers are not the main problem, but rather the drug runners and sellers attracted to the scene who push cocaine, ecstasy, and other drugs. "Maastricht is plagued by drug gangs," said Brice de Ruyver, a professor of criminology at Ghent University. "The coffee shops themselves need huge quantities of illicit supplies. Then you have trouble in the city because of dealers. The reasoning is that whoever is interested in cannabis in a coffee shop may also want something harder as well."

Maastricht officials say that isolating the coffeeshops will make policing more efficient and limit interaction between dealers and coffee shop customers.