Five minutes’ walk from a police station, close to my place in London, there is an unremarkable door. Behind it is an illegal coffeeshop selling cannabis — like in Amsterdam, except on a budget.
I headed there with a female friend of mine after a couple of beers at my place. Neither of us knew what to expect. We didn’t even know if the establishment would actually be there — I’d learned about it a couple of days before from a friend of a friend who showed me a sketchy Telegram chat.
At the door, we hit the buzzer. Right away, a voice comes through the intercom: “Remove your hood”.
My friend complies, and the door opens. Behind it is a narrow, somewhat dirty staircase — the kind you’d find in many London buildings.
As we climb, she asks me:
“How did he know I had my hood up?”
“There’s a camera above the door.”
At the top of the stairs there’s another door, this one metal. We open it and find ourselves three meters from a counter. A guy dressed like a ninja is staring at us. He is wearing some kind of weird mask or balaclava, showing only his eyes. Behind him there is another camera at the ceiling.
On the wall to the right of the counter is a whiteboard with a menu of two dozen or so cannabis products — from flower to hash to edibles. The menu is written in marker — as if we are visiting a cool little startup office full of people trying to take over a huge market.
Yet the vibe of the place is nothing like a startup office — it is more of a crackhouse. No windows in sight, plain walls, poor lighting, somewhat dirty carpets.
We aren’t sure how to make a purchase. You’d think the seller would help us, but he clocks pretty quickly that we’re both first-time buyers, and the conversation turns hostile. He informs us that walking in off the street like we did is against the House Rules — the place operates as a members’ club, and you need to come with an existing customer to be accepted as one.
Nothing like learning about new rules when you’re in the mood to break them. I start to feel caught between a rock and a hard place — the government with its laws on one side, and the weed “mafia” with its own code of conduct on the other.
The seller interrogates us: How did we learn about this place? Who told us about it?
I simply say “a friend of a friend”, leaving out the bit about the sketchy Telegram chat. He demands that I call my friend, or at least show him a photo. After a minute of drunken scrolling that feels like two eternities, I finally find the photo.
This calms him down somewhat: he claims he’s seen my friend before. I politely inform him that this is pretty unlikely, since both my friend and I only learned about the place a couple of days before and he probably hasn’t had a chance to come yet. I might lie to cops, but I’d never lie to an honest, hardworking criminal just trying to make a buck in a fundamentally non-violent way.
He ignores my words, and after repeating myself a couple of times, I decide to stop arguing: he knows what he’s doing.
Then comes the next problem. The seller demands to see our IDs. I’d glanced at my passport right before leaving my place — and strategically decided not to bring it. Why would an illegal establishment ever need to see your ID? To comply with existing government regulations?
They say it’s to make sure we aren’t cops. I feel like cops work for the government — the exact same organisation that printed my passport — so would they have any problem issuing a cover passport to their operatives? I am not sure what the economics of drug trade and law enforcement are. Perhaps the cost of requesting a fake/alias passport is high enough that a cop would be like: “Whatever, let them sell their weed, I’m not getting a cover passport just to bust them”.
Neither my friend nor I have our IDs on us, but he’s happy to see photos of them on our phones. We oblige, and the problem is almost resolved…
…but then the second “ninja” emerges from a corner. He, too, tells us about the House Rules and how we are breaking them. My guy, if we were good at following rules, we wouldn’t be here in the first place. The first seller tries to explain that our issue is resolved — that he’s already checked our IDs — but the second person only gets more agitated.
My friend decides to show him a WhatsApp chat with her weed dealer, contact name “Weed Kitten”, while saying: “Look, I am not a cop, I buy weed from Weed Kitten”. He says he doesn’t know who “Weed Kitten” is. I don’t know what she expected. That all weed dealers are part of the same workers’ union? That he’d be like, “Oh, Weed Kitten and I went to the same cannabis university — great guy”?
The conversation comes to a close with me saying: “Look, we didn’t know what rules you have here. We didn’t want to break them. If you don’t want to do business with us, we completely understand, and we’ll leave without any issues.” After a few moments of contemplation, both of them are happy to let us stay.
And so, for £20, we buy two grams of a lemony Indica strain that reminds me of Amnesia Haze — the first strain I smoked on my first visit to Amsterdam, the one that gave me a panic attack that day. Though I do have more pleasant memories with it too.
The sellers ask if we’d like to smoke in their smoking area. Excited, I head upstairs to check it out. On the floor above there are two rooms with signs reading “men” and “women and couples.” I check out the “men” room. Three black guys are smoking weed inside. No windows are visible. All the walls are draped with thick black curtains. A single lightbulb shines over a bunch of cheap furniture — plastic benches, torn sofas.
I go back downstairs and tell my friend it’s quite a scene — she’s excited to check it out. We’re about to head upstairs when the sellers inform us of another rule: no alcohol. My friend is holding a can of beer, and she hesitantly starts to down it. To avoid irritating the weed “mafia” by consuming alcohol on their premises, I suggest just pouring the can down the drain. A conveniently located bathroom allows me to do so. Yeah, the place has a bathroom.
We finally get to smoke our weed upstairs, in the “women and couples” room. As I grind it with a grinder conveniently borrowed from the sellers, a black woman walks in. This turns out to be lucky — we end up trading a bit of our weed for a bit of her tobacco. My friend wanted a spliff made from a mix of weed and tobacco, rather than a pure marijuana joint — and as for me I didn’t mind either way.
The next ten minutes or so we spend smoking the fat spliff my friend rolled. Despite us buying Indica, there’s nothing relaxing about it — I think the setting does its job of making the experience stimulating. It’s pretty hard to relax in a black room inside a crackhouse after a conflict with the team of criminals who run it.
Then we go back to my place. There my friend has a bout of anxiety about this encounter and decides to leave. I go to a nearby pub to have some fish’n’chips and a glass of beer.
***
Visiting this underground establishment was an interesting and intense experience. I’d always wondered what it was like to visit Amsterdam coffeeshops in the early ‘70s, when they were just starting to pop up — before the “tolerance policy” under which authorities began turning a blind eye to the retail marijuana trade. An iteration of that policy is still in place today: it’s still illegal to sell weed in the Netherlands, but the law isn’t enforced — and so the trade flourishes.
But at first, weed didn’t have this strange illegal-but-unpunishable status. The first coffeeshops had to hide — and hope that, if caught, prosecutors would deem prosecution not in the public interest. The Dutch legal system grants individual prosecutors such discretionary powers.
The prosecutors in the UK have similar discretionary powers. So on one hand the situation here is similar to the 70s in the Netherlands. But on the other hand contemporary Britain doesn’t have the same preconditions for liberalising its law.
Yes, individual smokers aren’t being targeted much — weed is partially decriminalised, and for a first offence of being caught with it, one is issued a Cannabis Warning and a £90 fine. And although selling cannabis for medical purposes became legal in 2018, selling it for recreational use can still result in up to 14 years in prison.
British society on the whole favours more liberal cannabis laws. A 2023 poll found that the majority supported legalisation. A 2025 poll found that the majority supported decriminalisation of personal use. Yet the UK Parliament doesn’t seem eager to treat this as a public mandate for changing the law.
And so the law remains in place.
The original Dutch coffeeshops emerged from prosecutors intentionally using their discretionary powers (which later got codified into an explicit cannabis policy). In the UK, we have something different: an enforcement gap. The police, prosecutors, and courts are overloaded, and so cannabis shops like this one remain open — for a while, at least, until they eventually get shut down.
It’s a sad, strange equilibrium. Weed in London is everywhere. Streets smell like it, parks smell like it. Amsterdam might be the “official” weed capital of the world, but London may very well be the unofficial one — it smells of weed just as strongly.
Something done by a large fraction of society can hardly pose that much danger to that society. The fact that this illegal coffeeshop peacefully co-exists with the rest of the urban environment is a sign that breaking this kind of law isn’t inherently dangerous.
It’s much more dangerous to have laws against “crimes” that have no victim. The absence of a victim means the structure of the law allows for selective and arbitrary enforcement. No one calls the cops after a successful weed deal — unlike e.g. a stolen phone. But if you’re a cop looking for a promotion, there’s always a “heinous criminal” who could be put away for up to 14 years.
And while most Londoners will never face this risk, the unlucky few will face all of it.