Wernard Bruining: the man who invented the coffeeshop before it was even legal to
Amsterdam's coffeeshops feel like such an established institution today that it's easy to forget someone had to open the first one, years before Dutch drug policy even had a framework for it to exist in. That someone was Wernard Bruining, and the story of how he did it says a lot about how much of the Netherlands' cannabis culture was built by ordinary people improvising, rather than by any grand policy plan.
From teacher training to teahouse
Wernard Bruining was born in 1950 in Sorong, in what was then Dutch New Guinea 1. He was training to become a teacher in Amsterdam when he discovered cannabis, an experience that redirected the entire course of his life 1. In 1972, together with a group of friends and roommates, he founded a teahouse in a squatted former bakery on the Weesperzijde in Amsterdam, inspired by the cannabis cafés of 1920s and 1930s America 2. He called it Mellow Yellow.
The first coffeeshop, before there was a policy for it
What made Mellow Yellow different wasn't just that cannabis was available there, informal cannabis sales happened in plenty of places at the time. It was the model: customers could order a coffee, then buy hashish sold in standardized, pre-packaged bags at fixed prices 3. That transparent, no-haggling approach was new. Before Mellow Yellow, buying cannabis typically meant negotiating price and quality directly with a dealer 4. Mellow Yellow removed that friction entirely.
Here's the detail that makes this genuinely historic: Mellow Yellow opened in 1972, four years before the Netherlands' 1976 Opium Act formally distinguished between "soft" and "hard" drugs and introduced the tolerance policy that coffeeshops now operate under 5. Bruining wasn't operating inside a legal framework designed for what he was doing, he was improvising a business model years before the law caught up to it. Mellow Yellow relocated to Vijzelgracht in 1978 and kept operating for decades, finally closing in 2017 5.
Not just a coffeeshop, a whole ecosystem
If Bruining had stopped there, he'd already be a significant figure in Dutch cannabis history. But he didn't stop there. Through the late 1970s and 80s, he traveled and learned organic sinsemilla cultivation techniques from an American grower, knowledge he brought back to the Netherlands 6. In 1980, he started the Green Team, credited with sparking the Dutch homegrown movement, the beginning of "Nederwiet" as a domestic product category rather than something exclusively imported 7. That same period, he founded the Lowland Seed Company, the first Dutch cannabis seed company 7.
In 1985, he opened Positronics, Europe's first cannabis growshop, a business that's still operating today 7. And in 1994, having watched the industry become increasingly commercial in ways he found less interesting, he shifted his focus entirely toward medical cannabis, founding the Mediwiet Foundation, the first medical cannabis foundation in Amsterdam 1. Since 2009, medicinal cannabis has been his exclusive focus 1.
A dream that mostly came true
Bruining has described his early ambition as wanting to make "Holland the Jamaica of Europe" 7, a cannabis culture hub recognized internationally. For a significant stretch of the late twentieth century, that's more or less what happened, the Netherlands became an internationally recognized reference point for cannabis culture, tolerance policy, and coffeeshop retail, a reputation that in many ways traces back to what Bruining started in a squatted bakery in 1972.
His contribution hasn't gone unrecognized. In 2025, he received the Koos Zwart Award from the Platform Cannabisondernemingen Nederland, an honor given annually to someone who has made an exceptional contribution to the legalization and normalization of cannabis in the Netherlands 8.
The bottom line
Wernard Bruining didn't just open a shop, he invented a retail model that the entire Dutch cannabis economy still runs on today, then kept building the infrastructure around it: seeds, growshops, and eventually medical cannabis access. It's a reminder that some of the most durable institutions started as improvised, half-legal experiments run by people with more conviction than a business plan.
