The introduction of marijuana for recreational use in the Netherlands is generally assumed to have taken place in the second half of the 1960s. This period is characterized in the collective memory as one in which youth broke away from parental authority and began to develop their own youth culture in which the use of marijuana played an important role. Nevertheless, the history goes back at least twenty years further.
The period before the fifties
In the nineteenth century, marijuana was available from pharmacies under the name Extractum to combat asthma, migraine, sleep disorders and seizures, among other things. With the development of other medicines it disappeared from the range. Until the early 1950s, the Netherlands was virtually unfamiliar with the use of marijuana as a stimulant. In the United States, the alcohol prohibition (1920-1933) led to the spread of cannabis use. Before the Second World War, the Rotterdam police reported that foreign sailors smoked marijuana in the port area. Shortly after the war, American soldiers used and sold it in Amsterdam bars. Cannabis use was initially limited to the small jazz world and its musicians and enthusiasts (often writers and students).
Undercover in 1954
It was not easy for outsiders to obtain marijuana in the post-war years of reconstruction in the Netherlands. There was no widespread trade and one had to venture into the nightlife of one of the two major port cities. In April 1954, an anonymous reporter from the daily newspaper De Waarheid had to spend several nights in Amsterdam to obtain seven marijuana cigarettes. Because ,the supply faltered, he paid five guilders each for it. A lot of money for that time, and in 2011 comparable to about sixteen euros. Normally people paid 2.50 guilders per marijuana cigarette in Amsterdam in the 1950s.
The Amsterdam marijuana cigarette
According to the reporter from De Waarheid, a German boat was one of the important suppliers of cannabis in the capital. It was resold as pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes that did not contain tobacco. The reporter describes the marijuana cigarette as follows: ,When we opened a carelessly rolled ‘cigarette’, we first found a piece of paper and in it plant particles that had almost dried to dust; the top leaves, stems and seeds of a tropical hemp species (Cannabis sativa)., The marijuana cigarettes were available in Amsterdam through street shops (including Museumplein, Rembrandtsplein, Leidseplein), in sailors’ bars, and in jazz clubs such as the Cotton Club on the Nieuwmarkt and Casablanca on the Zeedijk. In Rotterdam, Katendrecht was the place to go.
The Hague police knew nothing about it
In December 1955, a reporter from the Haagsch Dagblad showed that marijuana was also sold in The Hague. The quantities involved were small and here too the uninitiated had to make great efforts to obtain them. The reporter spent a month in the nightlife in The Hague before he could buy his first marijuana cigarette. The Hague police initially denied it. Before that time, a suspicious club in Scheveningen had been investigated several times, but nothing had ever been found. The anonymous reporter from the Haagsch Dagblad mentioned Rotterdam and Amsterdam as supply ports, where cannabis was smuggled into the country via ships from Morocco and the United States. It was then further traded in the Scheveningen jazz and bebop clubs on the Gevers Deynootplein.
First Dutch weed in the 1950s
The Hague reporter also noted from a detective that a prostitute from the Utrecht area grew Indian hemp in her backyard in the mid-1950s. The earliest recorded case of Dutch weed, one could say, although its composition was different from the Dutch weed that emerged in the 1970s. In the evening she sold it with her services in the port of Amsterdam. When the police discovered her extra earnings, she disappeared behind bars for six months. The real Dutch cannabis had to wait another twenty years, but smuggling via the national seaports continued.
Cannabis plant of the species Cannabis sativa (photo: Michael Wolf) / Source: Michael_w , Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA-3.0 )
Jazz and marijuana at the Cotton Club
American soldiers stationed in Europe in the 1950s could also often be found in the Cotton Club, where a lot of black jazz music could be heard. They sometimes also inquired whether marijuana was for sale. According to Annie Smit of the Cotton Club, Ghanaian sailors ensured its supply. They smuggled it out of the harbor and into the city in the handle of a paper shopping bag. It was sold to Surinamese who made marijuana cigarettes from it, or resold it loose in matchboxes. Initially the American soldiers formed the sales area, but later also the Pleiners (the artistic nozems who hung around on Leidseplein). They listened to jazz music and that is why they came to the Cotton Club.
The turning point in 1970
In 1964, the VARA current affairs column Achter Het Nieuws was one of the first television programs to pay attention to the marijuana cigarette. C. Houweling of the Amsterdam narcotics brigade said that approximately 2.50 to seven guilders had to be paid (equal to eleven to seventeen euros in 2011), and that the marijuana cigarettes contained approximately 0.2 grams of cannabis. However, the supply via the smuggling routes remained limited for a long time and the police occasionally intercepted only a few kilos. The turning point came at the end of June 1970 when the Holland Pop Festival (Kralingen) was organized in Rotterdam. Members of the police force were present undercover and decided not to intervene, while later Bulldog coffee shop owner Henk de Vries, among others, openly sold marijuana there. This was the impetus for a milder drug policy and in 1976 led to a legal division into soft and hard drugs. In October 2011, cannabis with more than 15% of the active ingredient THC was put on the hard drug list.