Who was first is still disputed
Mellow Yellow is usually named as the first, opened in 1973 by Wernard Bruining. It lasted until 2017, when it had to close because Amsterdam no longer permits a coffeeshop within a set distance of a school.
In 1975 Maarten Brusselers, who had been the house dealer at the Melkweg, bought an old shop on the Rusland in the city centre. That one is still trading today, though under a different name — The Hit.
A few months later, also in 1975, Henk de Vries opened the first Bulldog. All three have a claim, and the people involved have never entirely agreed.
The shopkeepers wrote the rules themselves
In 1976 the Dutch Opium Act was revised. It drew a line between soft drugs and hard drugs, and a small quantity for personal use stopped being treated as trafficking. That distinction is the foundation of everything that followed.
But nobody had written down what the rules actually were. So the shopkeepers did it themselves. Brusselers and a colleague drew up house rules — no sales under sixteen, a maximum of thirty grams, no reselling, no hard drugs and no weapons — had them printed on filter tips and hung them on the wall. His bags were printed with NIET VOOR HANDELSDOELEINDEN: not for commercial purposes. When the police raided after seven months, that argument held up well enough that the prosecution went no further.
The tolerance policy was not designed in a ministry. It was improvised in shops like these.
1978: a balloon goes up
Bruining stopped running Mellow Yellow in 1978. That same year he and Brusselers opened a shop together on Roeterstraat. It was their first project as partners and neither knew whether it would work, so Bruining suggested a name that said exactly that.
In Dutch, een proefballonnetje oplaten means to send up a trial balloon: float something and see which way the wind blows. They called it Het Ballonnetje. The little balloon.
It did not go well at first
The plan had a flaw. Brusselers had counted on the students in the building across the street, and they turned out to study harder and smoke less than he had assumed. The partnership did not last either — Bruining left after a few months and Brusselers carried on alone until 1983.
Why the year above the door matters
The tolerance held, and coffeeshops multiplied. By 1993 Amsterdam had around 550. That was too many, and from 1995 the city stopped adding new ones: an existing shop could change hands, but no new permissions were issued. By 2008 the number was down to 224, and in 2026 there are 165 left.
So a shop that opened in 1978 belongs to the small group that got in before the door closed. None of the places that have opened since are actually new — every one of them inherited a permission that already existed.
The rules are tighter now than the ones on those filter tips: eighteen rather than sixteen, five grams rather than thirty, ID at the door. We would not have it otherwise. Those rules are what the trial balloon was testing, and they are the reason it is still in the air.
Where this comes from. Much of the account above is drawn from a memoir by Wernard Bruining, Het Rusland en het Ballonnetje (Cannabis Conclusions, 15 June 2022). It is one man's recollection rather than a documented history — which is part of why the question of who was first has never been settled.