Amsterdam to close sex shops, brothels, marijuana cafes

by Ned Levi on December 8, 2008

Maybe they’ll have to start calling the Netherlands’ capital “New Amsterdam.”

Amsterdam’s mayor, Job Cohen, and his aldermen have revealed the details of their plan to clean up Amsterdam’s famous Red Light District. They plan to close more than half the city’s brothels, sex shops, peep shows, and marijuana cafes, in order to drive organized crime from the city.

Amsterdam has a population of about 750,000 and comprises the northern part of the Randstad, the 6th largest metropolitan area in Europe, with a population of about 6.7 million.

The “sex business” in Amsterdam is a $100 million per year industry according to a recent article. Even so, Amsterdam’s government believes it’s time to clean up the city, and voted 43-2 for the plan which they hope will open the Red Light District in the city’s center to galleries, boutiques and upscale restaurants and bars. Apparently Amsterdam’s voters agree. A poll run by the city found that 67 percent of Amsterdam’s population supports the plan.

At the moment, Amsterdam has 482 sex windows and 76 marijuana cafes in the city’s center. In a recent trip to Amsterdam I couldn’t miss the windowed brothel next to Oude Kerk, the thriving business being done by the marijuana cafes just a few walking minutes from Dam Square, and the shops on Damrak, and the sex shops, minutes from the Anne Frank House.

The plan to cut the sex windows and marijuana cafes by more than half, comes on the heels of the national ban on smart shop sales of hallucinogenic or “magic” mushrooms, going into effect.

The ban was prompted by wide spread news reports in the last two years of a 17-year-old French girl who jumped to her death from a building during a school trip to Amsterdam, an Icelandic tourist who jumped from a balcony breaking both legs, and a Danish tourist who drove his car wildly through a camping ground, narrowly missing sleeping campers, all after eating the psychedelic mushrooms they purchased in Amsterdam.

Deputy Mayor Lodewijk Asscher said,

Money laundering, extortion and human trafficking are things you do not see on the surface but they are hurting people and the city. We want to fight this.

It will be a place with 200 windows (for prostitutes) and 30 coffee shops, which you can’t find anywhere else in the world – very exciting, but also with cultural attractions, and you won’t have to be embarrassed to say you came.

Prostitution will be allowed only in two areas in Amsterdam including the famous De Wallen (The Walls), a web of streets and alleys around the city’s medieval retaining dam walls, according to a report by the BBC.

Over at the Royal Taste, a hotel in the heart of the Red Light District which has eight prostitute windows, owner Jan Broers has formed Platform 1012, a group protesting the plan. The group is named after the Red Light District’s zip code. Broers says he’s afraid fewer tourists will come to Amsterdam once the sex trade is cut in half, which will harm all Amsterdam’s critical tourist business. He claims to have already collected thousands of signatures.

Time will tell whether Mayor Cohen, and Deputy Mayor Asscher, or businessman Broers are right about the effect of the plan.

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Tagged as: Amsterdam, Anne Frank House, brothels, Dam Square, Damrak, magic mushrooms, marijuana cafes, Netherlands, organized crime, Oude Kerk, peep shows, prostitution, Red Light District, sex shops, sex trade

  • Karen C.

    Oh, sorry to hear about this. As a 60+ who missed the rebellion of the 60s and 70s because of getting married early and raising children, one of my fun memories of Amsterdam, besides the great shops, pubs, and architecture, was getting to buy and smoke pot legally.

  • Kweed

    There is a difference between “coffee houses” where you can smoke pot, and “Smart Shops” where you can purchase hallucanigenics. Why shut down the coffee houses because a couple of idiots ate too many mushrooms? And why must marijuana fall into the same moral category as prostitution?
    I wonder what will become of the annual Cannibis Cup and all the tourism it generates in Amsterdam.
    Does Mayor Cohen honestly think the majority of tourists are there for the tulips?

  • Ned Levi

    Hi Kweed,

    The bill to shut down the Smart Shop sales of “magic mushrooms” was passed by the Dutch Parliament and is a national ban, not a local one. It is completely separate from the new crack down by the Amsterdam government itself on the drug and sex trades. I brought up the mushroom ban, because that adds to the changes the Amsterdam government is making in their City.

    It turns out that Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen in an open letter urged Health minister Ab Klink to treat Amsterdam as a special case under this law saying he noted “that an overwhelming proportion of all problematic cases involved young, international tourists and took place in the country’s capital city. In many of these instances, the patient had consumed multiple substances, particularly alcohol and marijuana.”

    Under Minister Klink’s urging, no exceptions to the new national ban of on the sale of fresh hallucinogenic ‘magic’ mushrooms were written into the law which went into effect in the Netherlands on December 1, 2008. In dried form the mushrooms already were banned under Dutch Opiate Laws.

    As I mentioned, the primary impetus of closing all but 30 of the “coffee houses” where you can smoke marijuana is to drive organized crime out of Amsterdam.

    From what I’ve read in newspapers and news sites on the Internet, plus what I heard from locals during my trip to Amsterdam last winter, organized crime, heavily involved in the drug and sex trade in Amsterdam, is a major problem and getting worse.

    There will still be brothels and “coffee houses” in Amsterdam, but they will be far fewer in number, and far more highly regulated than they are at this time, and the brothels in particular will be allowed only in controlled areas of the City.

    It seems very clear to me, by the way, that the residents of Amsterdam overwhelmingly support this new plan by the Mayor and Alderman.

  • Ton

    I’m dutch so a bit closer to the subject, while you can have a discussion about this plan, there can be little doubt that it will fail

    yes there is a% of women that are forced into prostitution, closing windows will only drive that part of the sextrade deeper into the shadows, make it even more difficult to help these women, but for politicians a invisible problem is no problem. As to the organized crimepart, sure there is that (the strange thing is that the fact that people like the hells angels have had control over parts of the wallen has also detered other criminals like pickpockets, as they deal out a different kind of justice)

    The problem here is that the city is using the same methods owners are more or less extorted into selling their property by threat , not the way a government should act.

    Finally, as hard as it is to say (i’m from rotterdam and we have as much problems with that as a red sox fan with the yankees) it is a strange area that somehow works. 10 years ago every bridge had groups of afrikans asking if you wanted to buy heroine of cocaine, they got rid of that, good. What was left is an oddity, you see americans wearing shorts, brits in football shirts (drunk as usual) groups of japanese following a tourguide all with (semi) naked women in the background, somehow it works, so why mess with it.

    The people that used to live there liked it that way, the problems only came when people started to pay $$$$ for houses and see even more $$$$ if it is changed into a monument.

    For fun go to hamburg
    for shopping to dortmund, antwerp etc.

    forget about amsterdam it is a piece of historie

  • Cuj

    I have traveled to Amsterdam Many times over the last 15 years.
    It is a shadow of what it used to be. I used to love the city. The last time I was there I almost cried. Its over. I can not recommend that anyone ever visit. Its only a shadow of its former self. The “vibe” had gone way downhill long before this latest ban. Now there is pretty much no reason to ever return. MUCH better(Less Expensive) cities in the world.

    I will miss the “Febo’s”

  • Marco

    Hey , what are they talking about . Closing most multi-billion business is a crime against them selfs . How many people will lose theyr jobs . Tourists will stop coming . Much smaller income . And future crisis will affect Holland big time and its all because of those stupidos overdose tourists who know nothing about what they take . Shame on those who involved in such a plan . They not going to win . So sad , Im planning to move to Amsterdam and then I found this . Thank god it was in 2008 . Now late 2010 and smart business is bringing tons of cash . So what else do they want

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