The series is expected to shine a light on the city’s world-famous cannabis culture, which has drawn tourists from around the globe for decades.

Netherlands Tackles the Coffee Shop ‘Backdoor’ Problem

Since the 1970s, Amsterdam has been Europe’s cannabis capital thanks to its tolerant policies, and the series dives into that world, exploring not just the business of its iconic coffee shops but also the broader culture that’s grown around them.

Even though cannabis is technically illegal in the Netherlands, the country takes a famously tolerant approach known as gedoogbeleid, or ‘tolerance policy.’ Under this system, licensed coffee shops can sell cannabis under strict conditions, like keeping alcohol off the menu. However, the policy applies only to cannabis and other so-called soft drugs, as the possession, sale, or production of hard drugs such as heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, or ecstasy is still strictly against the law.

The Netherlands is home to around 570 coffee shops across 102 municipalities, with the majority concentrated in Amsterdam. In these shops, customers can legally buy small amounts of cannabis under strict rules, no sales to minors, no advertising, and a limit of five grams per person.

But here’s the twist: while selling is tolerated, growing and supplying cannabis is still illegal, so most coffee shops rely on the black market for their stock. This contradiction is famously known as the ‘backdoor problem,’ which has allowed criminal enterprises to flourish.

To tackle the ‘backdoor problem,’ the Dutch government has launched a pilot program where licensed producers can legally supply coffee shops, aiming to create a fully regulated cannabis supply chain.

The pilot involves ten municipalities, including Almere, Arnhem, Breda, Groningen, Heerlen, Hellevoetsluis, Maastricht, Nijmegen, Tilburg, and Zaanstad, that will monitor the sale of legal cannabis from authorized sources Around 80 coffee shops are involved, with the hope that this experiment could finally resolve a long-standing Dutch paradox where you can legally buy and sell small amounts of cannabis, but growing it commercially is still illegal.

This would potentially close the ‘backdoor’ and curb criminal activity, the very world that Netflix’s Amsterdam Empire is expected to depict.