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Amsterdam’s Reefer Revolution

How a handful of activists and entrepreneurs transformed the Venice of the North into the Cannabis capital of the world.

If there’s one city in all the world most associated with marijuana, it is undoubtedly Amsterdam. For decades, the city has been known for its liberal attitudes toward Cannabis … but it was not always this way. The Dutch policy of Cannabis tolerance—and the resulting coffeeshop industry— traces back to a handful of counterculture visionaries in the late 60s and early 70s who pushed back against the powersthat-be and paved the way for the thriving Cannabis culture that followed.

THE PROVOS

Like America’s Diggers and Yippies (whom they influenced), Amsterdam’s Provos (short for provoceren, meaning “to provoke”) were a leftist group that combined political protests with absurdist street theater in an attempt to goad authority figures into making public fools of themselves. One of their founders was a performance artist and anti-tobacco activist named Robert Jasper Grootveld. Starting in the early 1960s, Grootveld and his Provos launched a guerilla war against the tobacco industry, as well as a pro-pot disinformation campaign called the “Marihuettegame” (marijuana game). The premise was to score “points” by tricking police into arresting you for legal substances that looked similar to weed to demonstrate their ignorance about it. Those points could then be redeemed for real weed at the Afrikaanse Druk Stoor—an underground drug shop they opened in the Jordaan in 1963.

Dutch pot pioneers: Kees Hoekert and Provo Jasper Grootveld of the Lowland Weed Company selling Cannabis plants on their houseboat The White Raven. COURTESY COR JARING

LOWLAND WEED COMPANY

After the Provos disbanded in 1967, Grootveld partnered with a kindred spirit by the name of Kornelis “Kees” Hoekert. Like Grootveld, Hoekert was a disgruntled tobacco addict who’d switched to smoking weed and hash. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much Cannabis available in the Netherlands at that time—just imported black-market hash, typically of questionable quality.

Remarkably, it was Hoekert who first realized that Cannabis didn’t need to be imported—it could actually be grown anywhere, including there in Holland. So in 1969, he and Grootveld bought a kilo of hemp seed pigeon feed from a pet store and began planting it everywhere—in the forests, in the parks, by the airport, and even in front of police stations.

More significantly, though, they grew thousands of plants out on the deck of Hoekert’s houseboat (The White Raven) and began selling seeds and plants as the Lowland Weed Company. The plants had no THC and weren’t suitable for smoking—it was just political theater designed to educate and trick authorities into creating a bogus scandal. But since Holland’s Opium Act (their version of the Controlled Substances Act) only forbade the sale of dried Cannabis leaves, not seeds or live plants, the police never took the bait.

Nevertheless, they achieved their desired result: The police’s lack of action led people to conclude that Cannabis was now legal to grow in the Netherlands—making the Lowlands Weed Company the country’s first “legal” Cannabis merchants. The publicity also drew Cannabis enthusiasts from around the world to the White Raven. It became such an attraction that a hippie tour

called the Magic Bus began stopping there twice a day, bringing tourists below deck for a smoke, a cup of “high tea,” and a speech from Kees or Jasper.

Meanwhile, a similar scene was playing out across town, where a hippie chick named Mila Jansen (known today as “The Hash Queen”) had opened a boutique/teahouse called Kink 22 where customers were served a joint alongside every cup of tea sold.

MELLOW YELLOW

Soon, others would build upon the Cannabis teahouse concept. The first was a 23-year-old hippie friend of Hoekert’s named Wernard Bruining. Tired of dealing hash out of their apartment, Bruining and his roommates commandeered a Amsterdam’s first coffeeshop, vacant bakery outside the Mellow Yellow. the city center and in COURTESY WERNARD BRUINING 1973, opened Amsterdam’s first official coffeeshop. They called it the Mellow Yellow, after the Donovan song based on the urban myth of smoking banana peels to get high—an inside joke they believed only stoners would get.

Their plan was simple: Rather than haggling over prices for arbitrary amounts of hash and grass wrapped in foil as was the custom, dealers at the Mellow Yellow sold standard quantities packed in clear bags at set prices, so customers knew exactly what they were getting. To avoid detection, their rotating group of dealers would sling sacks from a leather satchel while disguised as customers.

RISE OF THE COFFEESHOPS

Naturally, it wasn’t long before other entrepreneurial-minded stoners followed Bruining’s lead. In April 1975, Mellow Yellow regular Maarten Brusselers opened his own coffeeshop, the Rusland. Next came the Bulldog—opened that December by sex shop owner Henk de Vries, who applied a new level of business acumen to the model.

Within months of those first shops opening, the Dutch government made a fateful decision—one that would ultimately catapult Cannabis culture in Amsterdam from underground to mainstream. In 1976, they amended the Opium Act to create two distinct classes of drugs: “hard drugs,” considered dangerous to the public good; and less harmful, non-addictive “soft drugs,” under which hash and marijuana were classified.

Old-school Bulldog poster and a 1981 Lowland Seed Company promo.

Amsterdam didn’t just pioneer sales and social use of Cannabis—it was also at the forefront of genetics and cultivation.

Then, four years later in 1980, they went even further—announcing a pragmatic new harm-reduction policy of Cannabis “tolerance” (gedoogbeleid). After that, Cannabis use and sales—though still technically illegal—would now be decriminalized, thus paving the way for the rise of the coffeeshop industry.

In the two decades that followed, the number of coffeeshops in Amsterdam grew exponentially—up to 400 in 1990, then 750 in 1994. In an effort to manage the “wild west” situation unfolding, in October 1994 the Netherlands established a new regulatory system for coffeeshops called the AHOJG criteria (a Dutch acronym), which imposed some basic rules: no advertising, no hard drugs on the premises, no disturbing of the peace, no minors, and no large quantities (daily limits of 500 grams per shop and five grams per customer).

THE GREEN TEAM

Amsterdam didn’t just pioneer sales and social use of Cannabis—it was also at the forefront of genetics and cultivation. After the Mellow Yellow mysteriously burned down in 1978, Bruining traveled to America in search of sinsemilla—returning the following year with new genetics and a hippie farmer from Oregon by the name of “Old Ed” Holloway. Together, the two set out to “make Holland the Jamaica of Europe”—establishing the first commercial cultivation operation in Europe and selling their harvests to the coffeeshops. Next, Bruining brought in his old friend 59 Hoekert as a partner to launch the Lowland Seed Company—the first commercial Cannabis seed company. Before long, some of the world’s top pot breeders were showing up wanting to join their “Green Team,” including Ed Rosenthal, Sam the Skunkman (developer of the groundbreaking Skunk strain), and Nevil Schoenmakers (who later co-founded the Seed Bank and Green House coffeeshop). The genetics The genetics Master growers: Soma, Wernard developed in and sold developed in Bruining, Old Ed Holloway, and Ed Rosenthal in Amsterdam around 1996. from Amsterdam by these legendary breeders would serve as the basis for most of the popular strains of and sold from Amsterdam by these legendary COURTESY WERNARD BRUINING today. breeders would AMSTERDAM DETHRONED serve as the basis Unfortunately, after decades of increasing Cannabis tourism (including the annual Cannabis Cup events each November), the Dutch government began taking steps to reign in the coffeeshop industry. In 2008, they for most of the popular strains enacted a rule prohibiting shops within 250 meters of a school—forcing of today. 43 shops to close. Then in 2012, they passed the wietpas (weed pass) rule that effectively banned tourists from coffeeshops (for more on this, see this month’s special section). These new restrictions, coupled with the meteoric rise of legal Cannabis in the US, have essentially dethroned Amsterdam as the world’s Cannabis capital. Nevertheless, the city’s groundbreaking policies and pioneers have undeniably paved the way for the Cannabis freedoms and phenotypes we now enjoy in America.

For more on Amsterdam’s Reefer Revolution, listen to Episode #12 of our podcast at worldofcannabis.museum/podcast.

Story and photos originally published on worldofcannabis.museum and reprinted with permission.