Status of coffeeshops

If RS really said this, then it seems he is misinformed and is now misinforming others.
First of all this isn’t something new. 10 years ago, cities in the Netherlands were given the legal tools necessary to ban non-residents from entering coffeeshops.
Secondly, the enforcement of the ban varies from city to city, not from coffeeshop to coffeeshop. When a city decides to enforce the ban on non-residents, the ban applies to all coffeeshops in that particular city and the ban is definitely enforced.
My hometown Breda for instance, is one of the cities where the ban is enforced. I’m not a visitor of coffeeshops, but just by walking past them I see that people need to show their ID to a bouncer at the door before they’re allowed to enter and on more than one occasion I have seen that non-residents were turned away.
The city of Amsterdam on the other hand, decided to not enforce the non-residents ban, so non-residents can still enter all the coffeeshops in the city.

The mood in Amsterdam however is changing. The current mayor of Amsterdam has already implemented stricter rules about the use of alcohol and cannabis in public and she’s looking to ban tourists from the coffeeshops. But as of right now, nothing has been formally decided, so tourists can still enter coffeeshops in Amsterdam.

Thank you Dutch_traveler…. I re-listened and heard that the conversation did mention the varying enforcement by municipality. It also sounds like any eventual effort in Amsterdam would first be targeting/emphasizing the red light district, which wouldn’t impact me.

Amsterdam you'll be fine.

It's a bit sad that coffee shops in the Netherlands attracted enough foreign low-lifes that they're restricted in many places. I feel bad for the owners needing to put door security staff on the payroll. You can grab a beer pretty much wherever without a bouncer, but for some reason in the Netherlands pot shops need them. That's a shame.

The last coffeeshop I went through was maybe 5 years ago in the outskirts of Rotterdam. Indifferent salesman behind impact resistant plexiglass, small inventory, general seedy feel to the place. Crappy product. I bought two pre-rolls, both nearly entirely tobacco. One with a little crusty low quality leaf. The other upon autopsy showing a few tiny little flakes of hash, like one little turn of a pepper grinder. I don't really like tobacco so I ended up throwing them both away.

Compared to the big bright clean cannabis shops in Seattle it was night and day. Our shops are stocked with hundreds of products of incredible quality. Flower, hash, oils, tinctures, prerolls, vapor cartridges, gummies, baked goods, sodas, popcorns, chocolates etc etc. Everything precisely lab tested and labelled with levels of THC, all the 1other cannabinoids, and major terpenes. Products ranging from active ingredient just THC, to no THC and only CBD, and every conceivable ratio of those two, and then various terpenes. Nearly everything in commercial packaging like on the shelves at the supermarket. Mostly no check in with security, rather you meet a friendly "budtender" as you walk in. They listen to what sort of experience you are interested in and why, then lead you through the options best for what you are looking for.

The popular misconception is that everything in the modern cannabis store is designed to knock you off your @ss into some sort of super-stoned state. But really what's in there are a bunch of carefully designed targeted products. Want to sleep? Clean the house? Feel calmly talkative at a dinner party but not seem stoned? Workout? They've got you. It's all pretty remarkably upscale and efficient.

Seattle is a city loaded with various dirtbags (and unfortunately way too many decent people down and out on their luck), but the cannabis shops don't at all seem to draw them in like they can in the Netherlands. The people going in and out are basically pretty mainstream. Ex NBA player Shawn Kemp has a cannabis shop near the waterfront, and that place swells with cruise ship passengers during the summer - think groups of straitlaced Midwesterner in matching Disney t-shirts.

And our cannabis shops don't seem to have the same sort of community impact. Everything seems basically about the same in Seattle as before the cannabis shops existed, at least related to the cannabis shops. I'm not sure why. Maybe since there are so many places in the US where cannabis products are fully legal, nobody migrates to create a dystopian drug environment. Maybe it's that our cannabis shops are not places to hang out as well? In Washington you're not even allowed to unwrap a product inside a cannabis shop -and that would be the same as cracking a beer inside of a liquor store.

It's too bad the Netherlands' pioneering experiment with coffee shops backfired on them in some ways. Maybe it's hard to be a little country surrounded by bigger countries that don't have similar policies .....