Anyone who has ever been to Amsterdam will undoubtedly remember the head shops selling weed, legal highs, magic mushrooms, salvia and so on, at varying levels of openness and legality over the years. But now, the world’s first MDMA store is set to be opened by the youth group of the Dutch Liberal Democrats.

The store will be open at 11 am on Monday morning (that’s Monday 7 pm Sydney time) at 10 Rosmarijnsteeg in the centre of Amsterdam.

Part of a greater initiative about drug regulation and harm reduction, the store will be open in attempt to emphasise the need for drug policy focus to shift away from total prohibition, and its subsequent reliance on illegal, unregulated drug trade.

To clarify, the store will be open for one day, and will sell placebos (which are usually just sugar pills,) not MDMA. MDMA is illegal in The Netherlands.

The Young Democrats are saying that legalisation MDMA will greatly benefit users, as it reduces the risks associated with the illegal drug trade. The main focus is to highlight the importance of regulating both manufacture and distribution. They’re arguing that regulation of manufacture will massively increase personal safety, by ensuring that the substance you are buying is, in fact, the right substance, the right amount and purity of that substance, and that substance alone.

Furthermore, the store will provide users with an open forum to obtain information and other harm reduction tools, such as preparation and recovery advice. President of the Young Democrats, Dirkan Tijs, says that the store will prove why regulation is far safer than illegal drug distribution. “We can prevent minors from buying, make sure there’s no overdose in pills, and educate people on ways to minimise the risks involved with ecstasy usage.”

The store is only one part of a larger program which sets out to change the government’s mind about MDMA. There’s a petition which you can sign here, and you can check out their website and Facebook for more information.

As educator and peer researcher Annie Bleeker told me in a recent interview, drug policy should be about KNOW, rather than just NO – and that’s exactly what the Young Dems are trying to do.

The initiative is partly in response to the death of three partygoers at last year’s Amsterdam Dance Event. And anyone who has visited a music festival recently knows that drug-related deaths are only too prevalent when unregulated manufacture goes wrong.