Amsterdam Won’t Ban Tourists From Its Coffeeshops After All. It’s Coming For Their Wallets Instead

For years, it looked like Amsterdam might finally pull the welcome mat out from under its stoner tourists. As of this week, that plan is dead. A ban on foreign visitors buying weed did not make it into the new coalition agreement the city’s governing parties unveiled on June 3, which means the mecca of cannabis tourism stays open to everyone.

The deal, struck between PRO Amsterdam, the merged PvdA and GroenLinks, and D66, and titled “Jouw stad is mijn stad. Ons Amsterdam [“Your city is my city. Our Amsterdam”],” quietly dropped the so-called ingezetenencriterium, the residents-only rule that would have barred non-residents from buying cannabis in the city’s roughly 166 coffeeshops. The long-debated plan for an erotic center near the RAI got cut in the same stroke.

The ban has been circling Amsterdam since at least 2021, championed for years by Mayor Femke Halsema, who could have imposed it by decree but always said she wanted the council behind her. Last year, the PvdA wrote it into its platform. The catch: GroenLinks and D66 never backed it, and once the PvdA merged with GroenLinks into PRO, the plan effectively died inside the party that had been pushing it.

The argument that won is the one coffeeshop operators have been making for years. Banning tourists does not kill demand, it hands it to street dealers. Criminologist Dirk Korf, who has studied the issue for years, found that roughly a quarter of foreign tourists would turn to the black market if the shops were closed to them, trading a regulated product for whatever someone on a bridge is selling.

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