This report is the fifth in a series of studies on the number of coffee shops and the policies of Dutch municipalities. In the first section of this summary the research design will be outlined. The second section contains a discussion on the number of coffee shops in the Netherlands. Subsequently, municipality soft drug policy will be examined. The final section contains the most important conclusions.

The aim of this research is to provide insight into developments in the numbers of officially tolerated coffee shops in the Netherlands. Attention was also given to changes in the policies carried out by Dutch municipalities. The following two research questions were addressed:

To answer these questions, INTRAVAL, bureau for social-scientific research and consultancy, held a telephone survey among all 538 municipalities in the Netherlands. This research was requested by the WODC of the Dutch Ministry of Justice. The results of this survey were compared with those of previous ones held in 1999 and 1997 (Bieleman and Goeree 2000, Bieleman et al. 1997). For the 1999 survey, interviews were also held in all 538 Dutch municipalities at the end of 1999. For the 1997 survey, a representative sample of 116 municipalities was selected.

In the year 2000, 103 of all 538 Dutch municipalities reported the presence of officially tolerated coffee shops. In total, there were 813 officially tolerated coffee shops. In 1999, 105 of the 538 municipalities reported a total of 846 coffee shops. The number of coffee shops decreased by 4 percent between 1999 and 2000. In 1997, the number of coffee shops was estimated to be 1,179. Therefore, the number of coffee shops decreased by 31 percent between 1997 and 2000.

A total of 88 percent of the coffee shops were located in 8 percent of the municipalities in 2000. This percentage refers to 719 coffee shops located in 51 municipalities with more than 50,000 residents. In 1999, 88 percent of the coffee shops were located in 11 percent of the Dutch municipalities. The highest concentration of coffee shops can be found in the urban area in the west of the Netherlands, in the larger towns of North-Brabant, south east Drenthe, the south of Groningen, and to a lesser extent in Twente, the Achterhoek, the south of Zeeland and in the south of Limburg.

Of all municipalities, 95 percent have developed a policy to regu-late the number of coffee shops within their borders. The follow-ing types of policy can be distinguished:

The majority of Dutch municipalities follow a zero policy (74 percent), two percent more than in 1999. Such a zero policy does not by definition exclude the possibility of coffee shops within the municipality borders. In 1999, three percent of all municipalities with a zero policy had one or more (maximum three) coffee shops. In 2000, one percent of all municipalities with a zero policy had one coffee shop within their borders.

Next to a zero policy, a maximum policy is the most common. In 2000, 17 percent of the Dutch municipalities had a maximum policy. This figure was 16 percent in 1999.

In 2000 all municipalities in which a coffee shop was located had a coffee shop policy. In 1999 there were two municipalities that had a coffee shop but no policy in this regard.

The number of coffee shops has decreased slightly since 1999 (see figure 4.1). The decrease is however smaller than that found between 1999 and 1997. Perhaps the number of coffee shops is slowly stabilising. Future measurements have to prove this.

Further, the number of municipalities with no coffee shop policy was smaller in 2000 than in 1999, while the number of municipalities with a zero policy increased. The policy types mentioned in the previous section no longer appear sufficient to categorise all the policies followed by the municipalities. It is perhaps advisable to conduct further research using municipality policy documents on the diverse policy types that have been formulated.