Amsterdam Coffee Shops Say Tobacco Ban is Blow to Business

Jun 17th, 2008
The Independent
By: Peter Popham and Vanessa Mock

Amsterdam - The Netherlands' famous coffee shops, where marijuana is available over the counter, face the threat of extinction when the country goes smoke-free on 1 July.

Anybody rolling a tobacco-based joint will be breaking the law – but only because of the tobacco. 'The new rule is nonsense,' said Willem Panders, of the Dutch tobacco traders' union. 'It will be almost impossible to enforce because how are you going to check if someone is smoking cannabis mixed with tobacco, or pure cannabis?'

But despite desperate lobbying, owners have failed to get the government to make an exception of them. 'Coffee shops will be treated in the same manner as other catering businesses,' the Prime Minister, Jan Peter Balkanende, said last week. 'It would have been wrong to move towards a smoke-free catering industry and then make an exception for coffee shops. People would not have understood that.'

At any one time up to 1,300 coffee shops are for sale across the country, but the Dutch catering magazine Horeca Vizier reports that the figure has jumped to 1,600 because of the ban.

Marc Jacobsen, of BCD, a national association of coffee-shop owners which has been urging the government to give them special status, told the online version of Der Spiegel: 'In a cafe you come to drink something. In a restaurant you come to eat. But when you come to a coffee shop you come to smoke, so smoking has to be allowed in a coffee shop.'

As in the rest of Europe the purpose of the ban is to protect the health of staff, who at present are obliged to inhale passively other people's smoke. But Sandy Lambrecht, the manager of the Bulldog coffee shop on the Leidseplein in the heart of Amsterdam, said: 'The new rules are absurd. You come to a coffee shop to smoke, after all – it's ridiculous that we have to comply. The new rules are meant to protect employees like me, but the point is that we chose to work here.'

Paul Wilhelm, the owner of De Tweede Kamer, one of Amsterdam's most famous coffee shops, founded in 1985, argued: 'If the boys are old enough to be sent to Afghanistan, then you can't tell me that people want to protect them from smoke in the workplace. They're old enough to decide on their own. They can vote, they can go to war – but now they won't even be allowed to make this decision?'

Many British pubs re-opened their gardens when the smoking ban took effect, but most Dutch coffee shops are penned into tiny premises with no outdoor space. The solution in Bulldog is to create a separate, walled-off space for those who want to smoke, off-limits to staff.

'We're now having to build a new section in our coffee-shop with a glass partition and special air filters for those who choose to smoke non-pure cannabis,' said Sandy Lambrecht. 'It's a shame as it will change the very congenial ambience in here – half of our customers will be shut off behind a glass wall. Our customers will grumble, that's for sure.'

But the Dutch Health Minister, Ab Klink, is impenitent. 'A positive side effect of the smoking ban,' he said, 'may be that consumers who spend the whole day hanging out in coffee shops will find other things to do.'
Tobacco ban is blow to business