Going to a cannabis cafe in Amsterdam is on the must-see list for many visitors to the city.
But as the city groans under the weight of mass tourism, the town hall has proposed to ban foreign visitors from cafes in the capital.
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Joachim Helms is co-owner of Green House Café in central Amsterdam, a popular café for tourists and locals looking to buy weed, hash and space cakes.
The store has been around since 1985, but Helms, who was born in Amsterdam, only developed a real enthusiasm for cannabis cultivation when he lived in San Diego in the 1990s.
“I’m from Amsterdam and loved the whole cafe system, but in America I really discovered more about activism and cannabis cultivation,” he said.
Helms now operates five Green House cafes in Amsterdam – a sign of the boom in business over the past decade, with increasing numbers of tourists arriving in the Dutch capital.
In 2019, more than 20 million foreign visitors came to the city, which has just over 800,000 residents within the city limits.
In recent years, Amsterdam’s city council has taken increasingly aggressive measures to tackle the overwhelming number of visitors. An advertising campaign by the Dutch tourism board in 2019 actively encouraged visitors to travel elsewhere in the Netherlands. Airbnb has restricted rentals and the council is trying to move the famous red light district and its sex workers to a purpose-built center elsewhere in Amsterdam.
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But of all the attractions that the Dutch city has to offer, its cannabis cafes remain the top bill for many tourists. In a survey of visitors to the Red Light District in 2019, more than half said they chose to visit in order to spend time in cafes. A third of those polled said they might not return if a ban is imposed.
However, most Amsterdam residents are happy that the city’s mayor, Femke Halsema, is now proposing a ban on foreign tourists in cafes.
Bernadette de Wit, who lives on the outskirts of De Wallen, the city’s red light district, says that before the pandemic, the atmosphere in the streets had become increasingly aggressive, mainly due to stoned and drunk tourists.
“They’re a combination of smoking, taking pills, and binge drinking. And then they’re like an unguided missile that’s completely out of control. There was an unpleasant sort of tension in the streets.
“They’re a combination of smoking, taking pills, and binge drinking. And then, they’re like an unguided missile that’s completely out of control. There was an unpleasant sort of tension in the streets.
De Wit says part of the blame lies with the city council itself. For many years, the city presented itself as the capital of freedom in Europe where anything goes, she says.
“They said, ‘Oh, Amsterdam is freedom. And freedom means you can get drunk, smoke and eat mushrooms, take pills, and go see prostitutes. And this bad type of marketing has also attracted a misbehaving type of tourist. “
It is clearly not the fault of the authority.
Other cities in Europe such as Barcelona and Prague face similar problems with mass tourism. Cheap flights and rental platforms like Airbnb have played a major role in exacerbating the problem.
Mayor Halsema hopes that banning foreign customers from cafes will reduce the number of tourists and attract a different kind of visitor – the kind who come for museums and culture and who might have more purchasing power. than tourists with heavy smokers staying in inexpensive apartments.
But the owner of Helms Cafes said the council’s proposal would only push drug trafficking straight to the streets.
“People will come to Amsterdam anyway, and when they can’t buy it [cannabis] in cafes, which they would normally have done, they will buy it in the street.
“People will come to Amsterdam anyway, and when they can’t buy it [cannabis] in cafes, which they would normally have done, they will buy it in the street.
The Council agrees that there is a high likelihood of this happening. But the Wit resident says a similar program was tested a few years ago in a number of Dutch cities, including Maastricht, and with police intervention it worked.
Surplus tourism is not the mayor’s only bone of contention with hash cafes. Halsema and other city officials believe the weed-smoking hordes of tourists have lured criminal gangs into the city with the intention of selling harder drugs.
In a letter to city officials in January, Halsema said Dutch police were also concerned about links between cafes and organized crime.
City councilor Diederik Boomsma agrees. He says the original concept of cafes when they were first created in the 1970s has been forgotten.
“The idea behind cafes was that you needed a place where smoking cannabis was tolerated. But that’s far from what it has become, which is a massive industry and a tourist attraction. And also the vast criminal network behind it now. “
“The idea behind cafes was that you needed a place where smoking cannabis was tolerated. But that’s far from what it has become, which is a massive industry and a tourist attraction. And also, the vast criminal network behind it now. “
Helms dismisses the claim that cafes are linked to a criminal world. He says one way to make the business more transparent is to legalize the entire cannabis industry.
Dutch laws are much less relaxed than many think. Although it is legal for Helms to sell cannabis, he can only have 500 grams in stock at a time and must not sell more than 5 grams to each customer per day. It is illegal for Helms to produce drugs, and Dutch police regularly visit cafes to make sure the laws are followed.
Boomsma and other city officials in favor of banning tourists from cafes also hope that a drop in the number will shut down at least half of the city’s 166 cannabis cafes. But the timing of the proposal is far from ideal.
The Netherlands has been under a strict lockdown since November due to the coronavirus and a national curfew – which sparked nights of rioting – is still in place.
Business owners are struggling and many are waiting for the day when their biggest worry was too many tourists.
Boomsma says he sympathizes with the companies, but the proposal has been in the works for years. He says the last thing he wants to see is the city’s return to the hedonistic capital it was before the pandemic.
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“Things were getting out of hand before the crown[virus] crisis has erupted and I and others have been calling for intervention for a very long time. We want to bring back tourists, but we want to attract a different kind of tourist. “
But it will still be some time before the ban takes effect.
Similar proposals in 2012 failed in Amsterdam, although this time around the measures had the backing of the city’s mayor.
For now, the Council’s priority is moving forward with plans to relocate the red light district.
Tourists who misbehave will likely be back on the streets and cafes of Amsterdam months before a ban is put in place.
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