Regulated cannabis experiment not ready for next step & could fail, coffeeshops warn

The regulated cannabis cultivation experiment is supposed to enter its next phase on April 7. From then on, the coffeeshops in the participating municipalities are only allowed to sell cannabis from regulated growers. But the experiment is not ready to move on. There is too little supply from the regulated growers, and the quality is sometimes insufficient, coffeeshop owners said in a letter to the mayors of the participating municipalities. They worry that the experiment will fail if the deadline isn’t postponed.

“In our view, a complete switch to legal products can only take place if every individual coffeshop participating in the weed experiment has access to a sufficient number of different types and of good quality,” the coffeeshop owners said.

The involved Ministries promised that supply would be in order by April 7, but 15 months into the experiment, only six of the ten designated cultivators are ready to supply the participating coffeeshops. There is now a diverse range of legally grown weed and hash, but too often, orders are incomplete, and some types are unavailable, the coffeeshop owners said.

“We have expressed our concerns before, but the date is getting closer, so we are sounding the alarm,” Willem Vugs of De Achterdeur, the association of coffeeshops in Tilburg, told Omroep Brabant. “We understand that not the entire menu in coffee shops will be legally available right away. But in the area of hash, joints, and edibles, a huge step needs to be taken.”

According to Vugs, if coffeeshops are unable to supply the products their customers want, “those customers can disappear into illegality.”

“If there is no good supply, that is a big problem,” mayor Paul Depla of Breda responded to BN De Stem. “Then people will go shopping on the street, and that is the worst that can happen. In addition to it being illegal, we have no insight into the health effects,” Depla said, referring to the use of pesticides and the like on unregulated cannabis.

Depla and Tilburg mayor Theo Weterings have been the driving force behind this experiment and are determined for it to succeed. The two municipalities were the first to start the experiment in December 2023. Depla, therefore, supports the call to not move on to the next phase before the experiment is ready. “The trial is going perfectly: more and more people are opting for legal weed, and there is less street trading. But I do not want the experiment to fail due to the lack of production.”