The years-long push to lock foreign visitors out of the city’s coffeeshops just died in coalition talks. The new deal keeps the doors open and pushes the tourist tax to the highest in Europe.
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.
The industry celebrated. Arjan Roskam of the Green House chain and Joachim Helms of the cannabis retailers’ association BCD, who spent months lobbying against the measure, framed the outcome as a win for the city’s street safety as much as for their own business.
The timing is the interesting part. Cannabis tourism is cooling almost everywhere else. Germany’s 2024 legalization means Germans no longer need to cross a border for a legal joint, Thailand’s weed boom is wobbling, and Europe’s newer markets keep their rules tight. Amsterdam, the original, just decided to keep its doors open while much of the world pulls back.
That does not mean the city is rolling out the red carpet. The same agreement hikes the tourist tax from 12.5% of the room rate to 16% next year, climbing toward 20%, comfortably the highest in Europe. Amsterdam will not stop you from visiting its coffeeshops. It will just charge you more for the bed you sleep in afterward.
