Coffeeshops in Groningen: the closed-chain experiment, rules and numbers

Groningen is one of the ten municipalities in the closed-chain experiment, which makes it unlike Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague or Utrecht: here the back door is regulated. The city counted nine coffeeshops on 2 September 2026 and intends to go to ten.

What the experiment changes

Everywhere outside the experiment the same contradiction holds: the front door is tolerated, the back door is not, and supplying a coffeeshop is a criminal act. In Groningen the decree sets different rules:

A coffeeshop may sell only cannabis from state-designated growers.
The national 500-gram stock ceiling does not apply; roughly one week's trading stock does.
That stock may be kept only on the premises — no stash address.
Unchanged: at most 5 grams per customer at a time, and nobody under 18 inside.

The residency criterion does not apply here

Inside the experiment the duty to admit only residents binds the three border municipalities — Breda, Heerlen and Maastricht. Groningen is not one. A non-border participant may adopt the rule voluntarily; the mayor of Groningen did not, and the further rules that were made concern location, stock and staff training instead.

The city's 2020 drug policy said the principle was no active enforcement unless nuisance arises. Later policies drop the sentence and say nothing about the criterion at all. So we do not write that the city has declared it does not apply the rule — we write that no obligation binds it and that the city has made no rule of its own.

Nine shops, heading for ten

The 2026 drug policy, adopted on 2 September 2026 and in force from 19 September 2026, finds the current nine adequate but adopts the advice to move to ten and open the procedure for it, with fourteen as the ceiling — the only expansionary policy among these cities. This directory lists 3, fewer than the city's nine: no Dutch municipality publishes a list of tolerated coffeeshops, so we include only businesses that call themselves a coffeeshop in their own public listing.

See all 3 coffeeshops in Groningen →

Sources

This is not legal advice. ZazaMap sells nothing, brokers nothing and advertises no individual business.