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The founder and owner
of the Bulldog Café, Holland’s first cannabis café, which opened in
Amsterdam, 27 years ago, sounds off…
JL: Where did you smoke
your first joint?
HDV: It was in Amsterdam, in 1965, when I
was about sixteen.
JL: Were
there many people smoking cannabis in
Holland, at that time?
HDV: Yeah, but actually it was smoked
mostly by – what you say - the black people. It wasn’t that common.
It was also a period of time when hard drugs started to put on its
hat.
JL: What type of cannabis
do you smoke now?
HDV: I prefer Morroccan.
JL: Why?
HDV: It’s soft, it’s blunt, it’s easy for
me - but then I’ve smoked cannabis for so long.
JL: When did you open
your first cannabis cafe?
HDV: In 1975, in
Amsterdam. I had just come back to Holland, after two years in
Germany, and saw that all my friends, neighbours and colleagues had,
during the time I was away, switched over to hard drugs. That hurt
me, because I lost quite a lot of friends. So I decided to open a
place where I could sift the hard and the soft drugs, especially for
my friends and neighbours. I opened a shop that was more a part of
my living room, and said, ‘I will kick out everything that has
nothing to do with cannabis.’
JL: Was that the first
café of its kind, in Holland?
HDV: Yeah. The name ‘Coffee Shop’, was
the name I came up with. At that time, there were what we call
‘coffee houses’, which were for the regular work people who drank
coffee before they went to work, or at lunchtime.
JL: What was it that
prompted the Dutch government’s tacit acceptance of cannabis cafes,
such as yours?
HDV: It was a fairly big
fight. In the first 2-3 years we had 30-40 police coming in to the
cafe, 5-6 times a day. And they busted me, baby, a hundred times.
And they busted my customers for a couple of hundred times. And
every time when the customers went out, I went on the door and told
them that every piece of cannabis that the police had busted them
for, and taken away from them, I would replace. So the customers
wanted to smoke a joint and they’d say, the same as me, ‘What are we
doing wrong? We’re only smoking a joint.’ At the time, the police
would take away all the cannabis they found and put my customers in
jail for a day, or half a day. Later on, it was just for a couple
of hours. But mainly, they took away the cannabis.
JL: When did they start
leaving you alone?
HDV: We created a kind of
slogan, ‘We break the rules, to create the rules’. That gave us the
power, and the reason why we have been going on with it. Now, the
cannabis cafes are ignored. They are not legal, yet. It’s a ‘blind
eye’ policy. They give you the opportunity to sell your hash, but
they bring it down and down and down with a lot of rules. And these
rules are the strongest you will find in any kind of Dutch business
– they’re not the normal rules a business can run with. For example,
we are only allowed to sell five grams of cannabis per person, per
day. That person has to be 18 years, or older. Each ‘coffee shop’
is only allowed to keep a total of 500 grams in stock. And we are
not allowed to bring 500 grams to our shop. That means that I need
a person who can carry only five grams at a time to my shop, where I
can only sell 5 grams, at a time, to a customer. That’s if you do it
by the book. I can only keep 500 grams of hash in my shop, at any
one time, but how I should get it there, nobody knows.
JL: It’s just a
miracle, I guess…
HDV: Yes. It’s a silly situation, but
that’s how it goes, in Holland.
JL: How many premises do
you own?
HDV: Seven, but it covers lots of things,
including a low budget hotel, a sports café, coffee shops, a
cocktail bar, merchandise, and the Bulldog energy drink. It’s now
more of a lifestyle thing.
JL: Have you ever
thought of opening a Bulldog cafe in Britain?
HDV: Yes. I always planned to open a
Bulldog in Britain, but I’d like to do the whole Bulldog line – a
hotel, bar, coffee shop – but I’ve been busy now, for 27 years, and
the battle is not really won. Every day I still battle with
authorities over here in Holland. So, if I can find the right
person, who says ‘I’ll go in the way you have been going, and in the
way you do it today’, with money to invest in a good place, then I’d
be open to open a Bulldog shop in Great Britain.
JL: Who do you prefer
to share a joint with?
HDV: The people I started
with. I’ve got more than 35 people who have worked for me between 10
and 27 years. They’re the best persons I can enjoy a smoke with.
JL: Finally, whose
doorway would you love to smoke in?
HDV: The first coffee
shop in London. |
