They’re often the main reason y’all want to visit Amsterdam: to gawk at the hookers in the Red Light District and to light up a fat old blunt in one of the coffeeshops. Unfortunately your chances to do so are diminishing steadily, as the Amsterdam city council is busy “cleaning up” the Red Light district by buying up properties and chasing away the prostitutes, while from July 1st there will be a nation wide smoking ban for the catering industry. Including coffeeshops.
Which may sound odd, because if there’s one place you go to smoke something, it’s a coffeeshop, but than the law’s intention isn’t to harass smokers (smokers may disagree about this), but to protect workers in the catering industry, just like workers in other industries are protected from their smoking co-workers. Coffeeshop or not, standing in secondhand tobacco smoke for eight hours or longer doesn’t do much for your health. It seems absurd at first, but since we already acknowledge the dangers of secondhand smoke in other industries, why should coffeeshops be exempt? Saying that the employees had a choice not to work in a coffeeshop isn’t good enough; there’s a reason governments make worker protection mandatory. If they don’t, history shows that workers have no protection and no choice but to accept this.
So, smoke ’em if you got them, because tomorrow you will have to do so outside.