By Frederik Hartig
There are exceptions to the ban. If an establishment can set up a separate room or add a glass partition to ensure that employees are not exposed to tobacco smoke, then smoking is permitted in those rooms as long as service is not provided.
That may be easy for larger coffee shops, but it will effectively downgrade smaller coffee shops into cannabis convenience stores where people drop in to buy pot but don't stick around. Jacobsen says he is planning to add a wall in his coffee shop, called The Rookies. The wall would separate the bar from the rest of the room, and he claims it will be the largest legal smoking space in Amsterdam.
In the smaller Tweede Kamer, though, it will be almost impossible to sufficiently protect workers from guests' tobacco smoke. Still, Wilhelm says he doesn't want to operate his coffee shop like a takeaway restaurant. "The soul of the Tweede Kamer has always been the social contact, the discussions, the chat, reading the newspaper or talking about politics. Now that's all being destroyed by what I think is an absurd decision."
Wilhelm may be fighting to preserve his coffee shop's convivial atmosphere, but Health Minister Klink has an altogether different view of coffee shop customers. In a letter to coffee shop association LOC in which he defended his smoking ban, he wrote: "A positive side effect of the smoking ban may be that consumers who spend the whole day hanging out in coffee shops will find other things to do with their time."
More than a million tourists visit Amsterdam's coffee shops each year, and Jacobsen believes more of them will now smoke pot on the city's streets. "People are going to be smoking in a lot of other places -- on the streets, in the parks, at home." With the coffee shops, he argues, you at least had a place where you could confine much of the city's pot-smoking activities.
The ban will also place additional burdens on coffee shop owners. If, for example, a crowd gathers in front of a coffee shop, it is the owners' responsibility to make sure they go away. If the shop owners aren't able to do so, despite making a visible effort, Klink has proposed banning all forms of smoking around the coffee shop.
It's a practice that's already been tested. In February 2006, the Amsterdam district De Baarsjes banned cannabis consumption on the local Mercatorplein square. Youth from other parts of the city where there were fewer coffee shops used to swarm to the 15 located in De Baarsjes. The city's statistical office confirmed that the ban had successfully reduced the number of disturbances caused by young pot smokers and that a feeling of safety had returned to the area around the square.
But both the GroenLinks and Demokratie 66 parties question the scope of the study in a report at the end of January in the Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool. They argued that residents of nearby Columbusplein square also should have been asked. Since the ban was put in place on Mercatorplein, there have been more pot-related disturbances at Columbusplein, they claim.
For his part, Wilhelm is still hoping to secure an exemption from the smoking ban. In July, Tweede Kamer will prohibit its guests from smoking cigarettes. He will also inform his customers that they are not permitted to roll tobacco into their joints. But he said he has no intention of monitoring every joint rolled in his shop.
It's also possible that officials will place a low priority on policing the smoking ban in coffee shops and, in a typically Dutch fashion, a situation would be created in which smoking would be officially banned but still tolerated.
"But that may also be wishful thinking," says Wilhelm.
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