I · The Rules · 07
Your hotel room is not a coffeeshop
Smoking in public, hotels and rentals
Can you smoke weed on the street or in your hotel?
Not in most places. In the city centre, smoking cannabis on the street is banned in several areas and can cost you a €100 fine. Most hotels and rentals don't allow smoking of any kind in the room, and some charge a cleaning fee if you do. Smoke in the coffeeshop, on a terrace where it's allowed, or somewhere you have been told you can.
The street rules are in entry 06: no smoking cannabis in De Wallen, on Dam Square, the Damrak or the Nieuwmarkt. Elsewhere in the city it is not a free-for-all either. A quiet joint away from the crowds is not what the police are looking for; nuisance is. Smoke in someone's face, a group blocking a bridge, a joint near a school: that is what gets people stopped.
Hotels and rentals are the part visitors get wrong. Most Amsterdam hotels are non-smoking, and that includes cannabis. Smoke alarms are sensitive, the smell travels, and a hotel can set its own rules about drugs on the premises. If it goes wrong, expect a cleaning fee on your card, which can run to a few hundred euros, and in the worst case a request to leave. Private rentals usually say the same in the house rules, and the neighbours are on the other side of a thin wall.
An open window or a balcony doesn't solve it; read the house rules first. If you want something in your room, an edible or a vaporizer is the quieter option (see entry 27), but the house rules still apply.
Insider note: The easiest rule we know: if you have to open a window to do it, you're in the wrong place.