Amsterdam’s Mayor Wants To Ban Cannabis Sales To Tourists

Amsterdam has served as a top cannabis tourism destination for decades. I will never forget when one of my best friends traveled to Amsterdam roughly 20 years ago and came back to give my friends and me ‘the scoop.’

Growing up in Oregon, and being in a family that sold cannabis for multiple generations, I would read about cannabis in Amsterdam in publications such as High Times and Cannabis Culture and would be skeptical as to how much of it was based in fact and how much of it was based on hype.

When my friend got back from Amsterdam and told me that the quality was off the charts, I knew that the cannabis there was the real deal being that he was a seasoned consumer. That, combined with how easy it was to walk into a coffee shop and make a purchase, made Amsterdam sound like heaven on earth.

Zoom forward to today, and cannabis is much easier to find in the United States and elsewhere. Just as people could walk into a coffee shop in Amsterdam 20 years ago and make a purchase, so too can they walk into dispensaries, clubs, and other establishments and make purchases in a growing number of jurisdictions around the globe.

Amsterdam is still a popular cannabis tourism destination, however, it’s less so than in decades past. I would think that leaders in Amsterdam would be scrambling to do whatever they could in order to maintain their standing as a top tourism destination and reap the financial rewards, yet, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Banning Tourists From Making Purchases

Amsterdam’s Mayor has previously floated the idea of making cannabis purchases illegal for non-residents. This week the mayor sent a letter to Amsterdam’s City Council that the plan will be implemented in the near future. Below is more information via excerpts from NL Times:

Mayor Femke Halsema of Amsterdam plans to go through with a ban on coffeeshops selling weed to tourists in the city, she said in a letter to the city council. According to her, the enforcement of the residents-only criterion is “necessary” for the municipality to get a grip on the coffeeshop market and “inseparable” from any relaxation of the cannabis policy, such as regulated cultivation or expanded trade stocks, Het Parool reports.

Over three million foreign tourists visit coffeeshops in Amsterdam every year. They have made the capital’s cannabis market uncontrollably large and a portal to serious crime, Halsema said. “There is a worrying interdependence between the soft and hard drug trade: money from the lucrative cannabis trade easily finds its way into hard drugs,” the mayor wrote.

Why is it that other jurisdictions can successfully regulate adult-use cannabis sales, but according to Amsterdam’s mayor, Amsterdam cannot? The situation becomes even more perplexing when considering how long Amsterdam has had to work on this issue compared to other jurisdictions that now permit legal cannabis sales to tourists, such as in North America.

Prohibition Doesn’t Work

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that the mayor gets their wish, and coffee shops no longer sell cannabis to tourists. If that happens, does that mean that tourists will stop coming to Amsterdam to purchase cannabis? Of course not.

All that will happen in that scenario is tourists will seek other means by which to acquire cannabis, and being that they will be doing so in the shadows, the purchases will be made in less-safe environments.

A much better approach would be working towards completely legalizing the cannabis industry in Amsterdam and the rest of the country. Establishing sensible rules and regulations would ensure that products are safe for human consumption, and would remove the ‘serious crime’ element from the equation that Amsterdam’s mayor seems so worried about.

It’s worth noting that the Dutch government is working towards launching a cannabis pilot program, and that may hinder the Amsterdam mayor’s plans. However, that showdown may not occur for some time being that the launch of the pilot program has been delayed multiple times.