Coffee shops will be allowed to have a membership of just 1,500 people. According to De Pers this will mean that tens of thousands will have to buy elsewhere. Illegally, the paper suggests.

At the moment coffee shops can serve as many clients as they want but if justice minister Ivo Opstelten gets his way they will become ‘small scale’ outlets for local users only. Foreign cannabis tourists will be barred. In future coffee shops can only have a membership of between1,000 to 1,500 smokers. The problem is that there aren’t enough coffee shops to go round.
Provinces
Based on the number of coffee shops, the number of cannabis users and the number of 18 to 65 year-olds, De Pers has calculated that Drenthe, Overijssel, Zeeland, Noord Brabant and Flevoland have far too few coffee shops to cater for the number of smokers in the provinces. Brabant has 48 outlets and approximately 84,000 cannabis smokers. There is only room for 72,000.
For 17 of the 101 local councils with coffee shops the membership restrictions will cause problems for users. In the Haarlemmermeer thousands of smokers will not be able to get into their coffee shop of choice while smokers who find themselves in areas without any coffee shops at all are left without any alternative.
A spokesperson for the justice department has said that the weed pass policy is being developed and that it is ‘based on figures provided by Van Opstelten.’
The lack of coffee shops is even greater than the figures suggest because places like Leeuwarden (13) and Amsterdam (225) have more coffee shops than they actually need and are hiking up provincial averages.
Occasional smoker loses out
Coffee shops will also tend to offer membership to those who smoke a lot which means the occasional smoker loses out.
Moreover, with the 350 metre school restriction zone an unknown number of coffee shops will have to close. They could be relocated but not every council will be willing.
Finally, the idea that foreign cannabis tourists will buy their cannabis in their own country once the ban is in place may be mistaken: a recent COT poll among 1,018 foreign coffee shop frequenters showed that 22 percent would still prefer to come to Maastricht to buy their stuff, even if they had to do so illegally.
This is an unofficial translation