Although The Netherlands host more than 600 cannabis café’s or coffeeshops as they call them, cannabis has never been 100% legal. Since the 70’s the government has had a policy of tolerance regarding cannabis. Soft drugs, as they call them, are available to any adult person. It is allowed to purchase up to 5 grams of cannabis in a coffeeshop or to carry around. Also growing up to 5 plants is kind of tolerated, although any kind of professional growing is illegal. This means that even putting a light on a plant to help it grow is considered illegal and if the police would actually find any plants at a person’s house they will probably seize them.

The strange thing about the Dutch policy is that it apparently is legal to professionally sell cannabis, but illegal to professionally grow cannabis. A coffeeshop is allowed to have up to 500 grams of cannabis in the establishment but on a good day they can sell a lot more than that. Some coffeeshops can sell even more than 10 kilograms of cannabis each day so where does all this cannabis come from if it illegal to be grown?

Each year the government busts more than 6000 illegal plantations all over the country, from small rooms where cannabis is being grown in closets to huge plantations where thousands of plants are being grown. Various cannabis seeds can legally bought in shops. Hundreds of headshops and growshops are selling anything you need to grow cannabis, but the government will probably never tolerate growing.

For years there have been rumors that the Dutch government wants to ban cannabis completely just like how in 2008 magic mushrooms were banned and put on the list of illegal drugs. Until 2007 it was possible and legal to buy magic mushrooms in smartshops, but after a few incidents involving tourists who supposedly consumed mushrooms, the government banned this product of nature. Of course a lot of people protest against this decision as some of the mushrooms that were being put on the black list actually grow in the wild in the Netherlands. Also it was later proved that the incidents that had been taken as an excuse to ban mushrooms, involved tourists that had been consuming various other drugs like cocaine and were drinking alcohol at the time as well. As a result, many people are buying ready to grow magic mushroom grow kits or mushroom spores to grow their own magic mushrooms, a procedure that is fairly simple.

The whole idea to make coffeeshop unavailable for tourists has been widely criticized in the media. The new law went in to effect in the South of the country in the beginning of March this year and has resulted in many problems. Not only the coffeeshops lost customers, but also other shops and even the local McDonalds complaint that they have lost a big amount of customers. The streets of the city of Maastricht, a city in the South which is very close to both Belgium and Germany, have been flooded with illegal street dealers that are selling cannabis to tourists. The local authority doesn’t really seem to know how to handle this change good as well and although the mayor of the city has been the only one that kept saying that things were going as planned; he now also finally admitted that the new law doesn’t work and that the government should turn it back.

The new law is supposed to go in effect in the rest of the country including Amsterdam from the 1^st of January 2013.