If you’ve traveled in the Netherlands, you already know that coffee shops are not the same as cafés.
If you haven’t, I’ll tell you: a coffee shop – often written as one word, coffeeshop – might serve coffee, but that’s not its primary purpose. Coffee shops are places to buy and smoke marijuana.
The first coffee shops in Holland opened in the late 1960s and their numbers grew into the 1990s. Stricter laws and stricter enforcement of laws reduced the number, so that today there are about 570 in the country, with 166 in Amsterdam alone.
How does it work?
While coffee shops are legal and regulated – for example, the distance they have to be from a school – marijuana is, technically, not legal. Or, to be more precise, dealing it is illegal, but tolerated within certain limitations.
In order to stay within the law, coffee shops can only have a maximum of 500 grams of marijuana in stock at any given time, and they can’t sell more than five grams per person per day.
The achterdeurbeleid (which translates as “back-door policy”) means that coffee shop owners may sell weed, but it is illegal for them to buy it. Their purchases, though, are tolerated, as long as they do it quietly, i.e. “at the back door.”
It’s completely contradictory, but you can see it as a truce of sorts. At the same time, law enforcement focuses on weed production and importation, and on hard drugs.
Amsterdam coffee shops under pressure
The reason I’ve brought this up today is that coffee shops are in the news again this week. Back in 2012 a new law was passed requiring customers in coffee shops to show an ID proving they are residents of the Netherlands. The idea was to reduce “weed tourism”: young people who come into the country just to get high and cause trouble.
The law was never implemented in Amsterdam, but Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, announced this week that she will implement the law over the next year or so. Apparently a survey of tourists in Amsterdam early in the year showed that 58% of those surveyed had come in order to visit a coffee shop. Her argument is that enforcing the residence law will be a disincentive for people to book budget weekend flights to Amsterdam.
At the same time, it’s clear that some of Amsterdam’s coffee shops will go out of business, particularly ones that almost exclusively serve tourists. Halsema predicts that the number of coffee shops will reduce to fewer than 70.
Not surprisingly, coffee shop owners are furious, saying their customers are not responsible for the city’s troubles. The manager of The Bulldog coffee house is quoted in the Volkskrant newspaper as saying that if Amsterdam wants to limit disorderliness in the city center, it should impose an alcohol ban on the English.
She’s got a point: groups of young adults, often from the UK, have been using Amsterdam for things like stag parties for years, generally making a nuisance of themselves as they drink, smoke, and wander the streets. I’ve heard that they’re particularly disliked by sex workers in the Red Light District, where they leer into the windows at the women, but don’t spend any money.
Coffee shop owners also argue that street dealing will increase as a result. Halsema has promised that research will first be done into this possibility. She also promises new rules to reward “good” coffee shop owners, particularly allowing them to hold more than 500 grams on their premises. This will save them the need to keep a stash somewhere else (illegally) and have runners traveling back and forth to resupply them on site.
Amsterdam in the pandemic
I assume that the revival of this controversy comes at least partly as a by-product of the pandemic. Amsterdam is normally an incredibly overcrowded city because of the more than eight million tourists that visit every year. The tourists can be a nuisance: adding to the crowds and pushing up prices at best; blocking sidewalks, getting drunk and generally misbehaving at worst.
The pandemic has allowed Amsterdam residents to experience their city without the tourists, and they like it. Halsema seems to be taking this opportunity to shift Amsterdam’s tourism emphasis to a different class of tourists: the ones who come for the beautiful canals, the museums and so on; the ones who spend more money in Amsterdam’s restaurants and hotels.
I have read that marijuana has been legalized in some US states in the last few years. How has that been affecting the quality of life in your city? It might be worth watching what happens as Amsterdam carries out this experiment; perhaps there are lessons to be learned from however this turns out.
Met vriendelijke groeten (with friendly greetings),
Rachel
P.S. I write about independent travel at Rachel’s Ruminations. Please join me there!