Dutch Masters: how Amsterdam's coffeeshops made the world's classic strains

Rules on importing and exporting cannabis in the Netherlands date to 1928, and according to Wikipedia's overview possession was first criminalised in 1953. The turn came with the Opium Act, which sorts drugs onto two lists. The Dutch parliament describes list I as substances with an unacceptable risk and list II as substances with a smaller one. Cannabis is on list II. Academic accounts date that split to a revision in 1976.

The logic was beautifully practical: if you want a joint, you should not have to walk past a dealer who also sells heroin. Keep the markets apart and you keep the people apart.

Selling stayed illegal. What changed was whether anybody got prosecuted. Prosecutors were told to look the other way on small sales under certain conditions. One academic account says that was extended to coffeeshop sales from 1979; other sources vary a little, so treat the year as a ballpark.

The conditions are now known as the AHOJ-G criteria, and the Dutch government lists them plainly: no nuisance, no hard drugs, no sales to minors, no advertising, and no more than 5 grams per person per transaction. A shop may keep 500 grams in stock, no more. And each municipality decides for itself whether it allows coffeeshops at all.

Ask who had the first coffeeshop and you will start a fight. Nobody agrees, and the argument is half the charm. It was not one grand opening. It was a few years in the early 1970s when several people had the same idea. As our walk tells it, house dealers at youth centres like Paradiso came first, and then people bet on being visible instead of hidden.

The names that come up most are Mellow Yellow, started in a squatted former bakery (1972 according to Wikipedia, 1973 according to its founder Wernard Bruining), and Rusland and The Bulldog, which Leafly dates to 1975. The Bulldog's Henk de Vries later opened a coffeeshop in the former police station on the Leidseplein. That was in 1985, according to our walk, and the old cells are still there. People now sit in them for fun. Few buildings show the irony of toleration so literally.

What these places shared was not only the product. It was the room: somewhere to sit, with a menu, music and a counter, that was not a bar and not a street corner. That idea, more than any single shop or strain, is what the world copied.

There was a catch, and it is the reason this series exists. The front door was tolerated. The back door was not. Shops could sell, but growing, transporting and supplying were still crimes. The Dutch call it the back door problem, and it meant that everyone who wanted good weed on the menu had to solve it quietly.

A common explanation for what happened next is that growers went indoors, small and controlled, where a plant that finishes fast, stays short and gives a steady yield is worth far more than a tall tropical one that needs a long season. It is an explanation, not a documented decision. It does fit what the Dutch breeders ended up making.

In the mid-1980s a handful of people turned the problem into a business. The Seed Bank, run by Nevil Schoenmakers, is said to have started around 1984. Sensi Seeds followed in 1985, founded by Ben Dronkers. According to the Hash Marihuana & Hemp Museum, which Dronkers also founded, seeds could at the time be sold as souvenirs, which is a lovely sentence to write about a legal loophole. Green House Seed Company arrived in 1994, founded by Arjan Roskam and Scott Blakey.

The raw material came from abroad. A Californian breeder known as Sam the Skunkman, David Watson, is widely credited with carrying American genetics to the Netherlands, among them a skunk hybrid and a Haze. When he came is anybody's guess: accounts say 1976, 1984 or 1985. Nevil Schoenmakers is reported to have crossed those lines with others, Northern Lights among them, and so to have made the first Dutch crosses. Much of this rests on retellings rather than on documents, which is exactly why we keep saying 'reported'.

In November 1988 the magazine High Times held the first Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam, started by its editor Steven Hager. For the seed companies and the coffeeshops it was a shop window. A win was good publicity, for the strain and for the shop that grew it.

The list of overall winners on Wikipedia reads like the table of contents of this series: Skunk #1 in 1988, a Northern Lights and Haze cross and Northern Lights #5 in the two years after, Jack Herer in 1994, White Widow in 1995, Super Silver Haze in 1998 and 1999, Amnesia Haze in 2004 and Super Lemon Haze in 2008 and 2009. Handle that list with care. It has no citations for its early years, we could not find a second source that confirms it, and breeders' own pages sometimes give different wins. Use it as a guide to who was famous when, not as a record.

These are the plants that Amsterdam bred, stabilised or made famous, roughly in the order they arrived. Each one links to its page in the Amsterdam Menu, where you can see which shops list it.

One warning before you start reading. Studies of commercial cannabis have found that strain names often do not match the genetics behind them: two plants with the same name can be quite different, and two with different names can be close relatives. A menu that says 'Amnesia' or 'Silver Haze' may mean the breeder's original, a later cross or something else under the same label. The strain pages say what we know about the original, and what we do not know about what is in the jar.

This series is history and information. It is not a guide to buying seeds, to growing, or to what any strain will do for you. Cannabis laws differ per country, and in the Netherlands the shops are tolerated rather than legal. If you want to know what to order today, the Amsterdam Menu lists what the shops we have checked are selling.