'Dam Pure Pot: Amsterdam Coffee Shops Go Tobacco-Free

The days of twisting a fat Euro cone at the Grasshopper will be coming to an end as Holland adopts its smoking ban July 1.

In a move that has left many Netherlanders wondering what the government is smoking, coffee shops are being lumped together with restaurants, bars and cafes, which are being forced to lose the ashtrays. Ironically, customers will still be able to buy hash or pot, roll it and smoke it at more than 700 approved shops. But starting the first of next month, those joints must contain pure marijuana only. People wishing to mix tobacco in, as is the continental custom, must go outside. Coffee shops will also be given the option of partitioning off areas where patrons can light up cigarettes — as long as the partitions are airtight and no services are provided inside.

The tobacco ban is intended to protect workers from harmful secondhand smoke, but coffee shop owners, who stand to lose business if people go elsewhere to smoke, describe the move as absurd paternalism. "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," Paul Wilhelm, owner of De Tweede Kamer, one of Amsterdam's oldest shops, was quoted as saying in Spiegel. "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?"

Still adding to the absurdity is the issue of enforcement. It is one thing for a government regulator to pop into a bar, spot someone smoking a cigarette and issue a fine. But with billowing pot smoke clouding a dimly lit coffee shop, how can one judge whether tobacco has been mixed into one of the many joints being passed around? Under the new provision, suspected joints are to be confiscated and sent to a lab for analysis. We can only hope that if the joint is found to be pure, it will be returned to the owner with the government's sincerest apologies.

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