Gezellig is a fantastic Dutch word that encompasses a whole mood and defies translation. I think it means a combination of things: the warm feeling of belonging, being in the right place at the perfect time, surrounded by the most genial company. You hear the word a lot in Amsterdam; the concept of gezellig is at the heart of Dutch culture. Finding the sweet moment, relaxing into it, being as cozy and comfortable as possible… it’s a prescription for any stressed-out modern soul.

Factor in the world’s best hash and cannabis, set against the twinkly Advent-calendar beauty of the “Venice of the North,” and you’re in absolute heaven. Every time I’ve visited Amsterdam, I’ve experienced this untranslatable feeling. It’s potent stuff—a swirl of strong coffee and ice-cold foamy glasses of beer, bicycle bells dinging, and rose-ringed parakeets flitting through the Vondelpark in late-afternoon sunshine, all suffused by the sweet aromas of weed and hash.

When I booked a trip to Amsterdam last summer while dreaming of my previous hazy visits, I considered the perils of pining for bygone days. To quote author Brené Brown, “Nostalgia is… a dangerous form of comparison. Think about how often we compare our lives to a memory that nostalgia has so completely edited that it never really existed.” This would be my first trip to the Netherlands in almost a decade, and I was curious to see how the city’s legendary cannabis culture had evolved—or, perhaps, declined, with Barcelona’s rise to prominence as a new European weed capital.

In 2013, I worked the 26th Annual Amsterdam High Times Cannabis Cup during a long November week that lives in my head as a series of frosty snapshots. I judged the Seed Company Sativa category and was a live wire for five straight days as I sampled 21 strains from legendary outfits like Elemental Seeds, Reserva Privada, and Karma Genetics. That year’s winners were genetic heavyweights Tangie, Sour Power, and a super-tasty Sour Diesel cross called Headbanger.

Dutch authorities shut down the Cannabis Cup Expo at the last minute that year, and the High Times staff had to scramble to keep vendors and attendees happy. I remember a lot of long, chilly walks along glittering canals, shuttling back and forth to shows at the Melkweg from coffeeshops that had entered the competition. My judges’ kit powered me through it all like a little weed jetpack, especially on the night my phone died, and I got hopelessly lost. Fortunately, I somehow found my way to the judges’ dinner, where I was enveloped in a cloud of good cheer and great smoke. Gezellig!

This time around, my travel companion and I had no plans beyond eating, smoking, and visiting museums for three days to unwind after a few weeks in the U.K. Our train from London pulled into Amsterdam Central Station at 4:20 p.m. We were in the flow. We dropped our bags at our hotel and headed right for the iconic coffeeshop Green House in the area known as De Wallen, or the red light district.

We pulled up as the sky was darkening into evening shades of purple. The neon sign in the window cast an amber glow over the scene humming in the coffeeshop. It was cinematic and gorgeous, and it smelled great. A laughing girl bumped into me on her way out as we ducked inside. I could feel the days I’d spent in London melting off me, almost hissing as they swirled away. We were in the right place at the right moment. What a relief. My memories of Amsterdam weren’t nostalgic; this was now.

Inside the glow of Green House, we were greeted by Joa Helms, the CEO of the Green House Seed Company. He gestured to the menu on the wall illuminated behind the busy budtenders and asked what we wanted to sample. “Super Lemon Haze, of course,” Helms said with a grin, “and how about some Ztrawberry?” We gratefully—almost wordlessly, I think—sank into a booth next to the window with the two packets of flower he handed us, along with rolling papers and a grinder. “It’s made from hemp,” Helms said of the grinder, as he departed into the night with a friendly wave, leaving us with our treasures.

Green House Seed Company has won countless awards for legendary strains like White Widow and Super Silver Haze, as well as for Super Silver’s progeny, Super Lemon Haze, which won back-to-back Cannabis Cups in 2008 and 2009. As my friend and I stuck our noses into the bags of flower to determine which way our evening would bend, one sniff of Super Lemon Haze was all we needed to know how it was going to go. Roll up, smoke, relax, repeat.

We floated out of Green House into the cool September night after a while, turning left, right, and left again on our evening adventure. We babbled through our Haze-y buzz as we passed by sex workers posing in windows, their neon lingerie popping under black lights with drapes barely concealing rudimentary beds just behind them. Moving through a crush of tourists with unclothed bodies on display for the gawking masses was elemental and deeply weird, but it also felt exactly right because I knew this would likely be the last time we’d see De Wallen like this.

In a move billed as an antidote to the effects of hedonistic tourism, the Dutch government has hatched a plan to relocate the red light district to the outskirts of town. The proposal would shut down sex workers’ windows in an attempt to reset the city as a family-friendly destination. Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema is leading the charge to redefine the city’s reputation—and she also wants to ban non-residents in coffeeshops by enforcing a national residents-only rule. Halsema says that banning tourists from coffeeshops is unavoidable in order to tackle tourist nuisances that arise from the “soft drug” sector—i.e. cannabis.

My friend and I chatted about the complicated nature of sex work and drug culture as we strolled along the canals. Prostitution in Amsterdam has been legal and regulated since 2000. Cannabis, however, has never been legal in the Netherlands—the government’s policies tolerate the possession and sale of small quantities of weed and psilocybin, and it’s decriminalized for personal use, but it’s not legal. And for decades, that was just fine, until conservatives like Halsema decided it wasn’t. The tide has turned for the counterculture in Amsterdam as politicians debate about what’s best for the city. It’s certainly the end of an era.

As we finally made our way back to our hotel, my buzz was wearing thin, but my bud stopped to roll up some Ztrawberry, popping open our second fragrant pouch. We perched next to each other on the edge of a canal barge, watched by a well-fed cat who sat cleaning its puffy tail with an eye on us. I was pretty faded after our glowy Super Lemon Haze’d evening, and I was ready to call it quits. But the click of my friend’s lighter and the pass of a joint turned it all around. 

Ztrawberry is a Runtz x A.M.S. cross—it’s got a heavy kick from its Gelato parent sweetness, which fades to a perfect, heady buzz. Holy smokes, I thought, sitting on the edge of the canal barge as I gazed back at the Dutch cat. OK, you are NOT TIRED. You feel great. You feel clear and calm, and in the perfect state of being… oh, wait, this is… yes, it’s gezellig.

This article was originally published in the January 2023 issue of High Times Magazine.

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According to a new study, New York City consumes more cannabis out of any city in the world, at 62.3 metric tons (approximately 137,000 pounds) per year. The study, compiled as the “2023 Cannabis Global Price Index,” was conducted by health information resource CFAH, which collected data on cannabis prices from 140 cities worldwide.

In addition to exploring the highest cannabis-consuming cities in the world, the research explored the cities with the most and least expensive cannabis and the price trajectory for cannabis in the U.S.

Which Cities Consume the Most Cannabis?

CFAH examined the top and bottom cannabis-consuming nations in order to hone in on the study cities, noting the legal status of cannabis in each region. Researchers then chose the final list of 140 cities to display the “best comparison of the global cannabis price.” Prices per gram were obtained through crowdsourced, city-level polls adjusted to the PriceOfWeed dashboard and UNODC World Drug Report.

To track total consumption, CFAH used figures collected from the World Health Organization (WHO), and the U.S. price trajectory figures were calculated through Seasonal AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA), a model used to account for patterns in data.

New York City has a pretty major lead on other cities when it comes to cannabis consumption. Sydney, Australia ranked second, despite the illegal status of cannabis in the country, at 45.8 metric tons per year, about 17 metric tons less than the Big Apple. Los Angeles ranked third, at 35 metric tons per year, followed by Chicago at 24.9 metric tons and Rome, Italy at 21.9 metric tons per year.

The list ranks the top 20 cities. From sixth to 20th, it includes (in order): Houston, Texas; Toronto, Canada; Tokyo, Japan; Prague, Czech Republic; Vienna, Austria; Hamburg, Germany; Phoenix, Arizona; Montreal, Canada; Melbourne, Australia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Vancouver, Canada; Uskudar, Turkey; Dublin, Ireland; Denver, Colorado and Annapolis, Canada.

Which Cities Have the Most and Least Expensive Cannabis?

Cannabis is illegal and highly criminalized in Japan, but for people looking to toke up anyway, they’ll have to pay a pretty penny. Tokyo ranked as the city with the most expensive cannabis, at $33.8 per gram. Dublin, Ireland and Tallinn, Estonia followed at $22.50 and $22.10 per gram, respectively. 

Montreal, Canada had the least expensive cannabis according to the study, at just $5.90 per gram. Bangalore, India and Notre Dame, Canada followed, at $6 and $6.20 per gram, respectively.

While it’s a common assumption that legality may mean wider availability, ultimately leading to lower prices, both the most and least expensive cannabis cities were well-balanced when it came to legal or illegal status. The top 10 most expensive cannabis cities include six cities where cannabis is illegal and four where it’s legal. The least expensive cannabis cities vary only slightly, with six cities where cannabis is legal and four where it’s illegal.

Forecasting Future Cannabis Prices in the U.S.

Researchers used SARIMA to project future trends for cannabis prices in the U.S. The time-series forecasting model takes both the trend and seasonality of the data into account — “It combines the autoregressive, integrated, and moving average models with seasonal components to capture the trend, seasonality, and random fluctuations in a time series,” according to the study.

Looking at a CFAH graph of prices over the past 30 years, namely the erratic zigzagging through the decades, it may feel like a shot in the dark to truly predict the price of cannabis in the future. Still, CFAH predicts that the price of cannabis per gram in America could fall to an average of $5.61 per gram by 2030.

Given the trends of several legal cannabis states in the U.S. as of late, it’s perhaps not surprising to expect a continued price drop, especially as the market continues to grow and with the potential of federal legalization to come. 

Regarding New York’s status as the heaviest cannabis consuming state across the globe? Odds are that the city will maintain the title, especially as the recreational market continues to get off the ground. 

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As a still-young industry, many are all too familiar with the stringent compliance protocols attached to cannabis today. Cannabis retailers across the U.S. must comply with an array of rules carried down by state cannabis officials, in part to ensure they check ID and that products stay out of the hands of underage consumers.

Data published in the journal Addictive Behaviors sheds new light on just how well dispensaries follow these regulations, ultimately finding that adult-use retailers across five U.S. cities were in strict compliance with laws requiring patrons to show identification and proof of legal age.

“As cannabis retail expands in the U.S., its surveillance is crucial to inform regulations and protect consumers. This study addresses this need by conducting point-of-sale audits examining regulatory compliance (e.g., age verification, signage), advertising/promotional strategies, products, and pricing…” authors state in the abstract.

Cannabis Compliance: ID Verification, Warning Signage and Appealing to Minors

A team of investigators affiliated with George Washington University’s Milken Institute of Public Health conducted point-of-sale audits of 150 randomly selected recreational dispensaries in Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Portland, and Seattle, 30 for each city. Investigators conducted the audits in summer 2022.

Age verification rates were high, above 90%, and the majority of retailers had signage indicating restricted access (87.3%), onsite consumption (73.3%), and distribution to minors (53.3%). Retailers were also likely to post warnings regarding cannabis use during pregnancy and while nursing (72%), followed by health risks (38%), impacts on children/youth (18.7%) and DUI (14%).

Conversely, 28.7% posted health claims about cannabis, 20.7% posted “youth-oriented signage” and 18% had products with “youth-oriented packaging.”

Other Signage, Marketing and Product Findings

The study also explored other information dispensaries generally posted and marketed in store. Price promotions were highly prevalent, especially price specials (75.3%), followed by daily, weekly, and monthly specials (66.7%) and signage regarding membership programs (39.3%). 

One-fourth of the stores had signs and promotions advertising curbside delivery/pickup (28%) and/or online ordering (25.3%). Social media and website promotions were noted in 64.7% of audited stores. 

Finally, investigators took a closer look at the product selection offered by retailers. The most cannabis products were most often e-liquids (38%) or oils (24.7%), with edibles appearing most frequently (53%) as the least potent product.

The most expensive product was often bud and flower (58%); the least expensive was joints (54%). More than 81% of retailers sold vaporizers, rolling papers and glass, like hookahs, water pipes and bongs; 22.6% sold CBD products.

Results Echo Past Compliance Data

“Marketing strategies differed across cities, reflecting differences in state-specific regulations and/or gaps in compliance/enforcement,” investigators wrote. “Findings underscore the need for ongoing cannabis retail surveillance to inform future regulatory and enforcement efforts.”

NORML Deputy Director Paul Armentano commented on the study’s results, initially emphasizing, “Regulation works.”

“Illicit marijuana providers don’t ask for or check for ID, but licensed businesses most certainly do,” Armentano wrote in a NORML blog post. “States’ real-world experience with marijuana legalization affirms that these policies can be implemented in a way that provides regulated access for adults while simultaneously limiting youth access and misuse.”

The age verification numbers are consistent with previous research. Specifically, one 2022 study focusing on the California market found that dispensaries were highly compliant with ID policy, 100% total compliance with ID policy among the randomly selected retailers.

“It appears that licensed California recreational marijuana outlets avoid selling marijuana to underage customers. One reason could be a strong incentive for recreational marijuana outlet owners and managers to avoid being shut down for an illegal activity,” authors wrote.

That study also suggested that further studies and cannabis enforcement agencies should investigate if underage patrons attempt to enter cannabis retailers with fake IDs and whether underage patrons are obtaining cannabis from illicit dispensaries or other sources.

A bulletin issued by the Colorado Marijuana Enforcement Division in August 2022 also found that, of more than 190 compliance checks utilizing underage operatives, four businesses in the state made a sale to those individuals, demonstrating a 98% compliance rate.

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