Long before Americans lavished among shelves of products in the cannabis dispensaries, Amsterdam was the world’s weed haven. The capital city adopted a tolerance for cannabis in the 1970s that persisted for decades. However, in 2023, the Red Light District imposed a public cannabis smoking ban in a push to clean up the area.
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This has not stopped coffeeshops from business as usual. Ventures like Smoke Weed Every Day, an Amsterdam coffeeshop recently opened by Snoop Dogg, continue establishing roots. The new regulations may deter tourists from chiefing up the main streets, though. As the city continues modifying its relationship with pot, another distinctively Dutch vice is gaining steam–kinda.
Cannabis-laden coffeeshops are no longer the cutting edge of Amsterdam. Now the focus has moved to MDMA. The XTC Shop, an imagining of an MDMA dispensary, will be popped up for a few more weeks in the Poppi Drugs Museum. The exhibit and social experiment are sponsored by harm reduction non-profit Mainline and posit what safely distributed, legal MDMA could look like without the oft-gnarly restrictions that come with legalizing drugs.
Deputy Mayor Alexander Scholtes spoke about the reasons for the exhibit during the opening event on October 14th.
“The war on drugs has had a huge impact on this city,” Scholtes said. “Look, drug use has always been an issue, and it certainly has risks. But that is exactly why we should no longer leave drugs to criminals.”
The exhibit, which runs through November 24th, does not actually dole out pressed pills. It’s just candy. However, the two-room exhibit challenges people to ponder the difference between drugs and pharmaceuticals.
Visitors enter the exhibit in the first room, where a technician in a white lab coat conducts a consultation. They will share about past MDMA experience, any history of mental illness, and grant permission to call their healthcare provider if necessary. Everyone is weighed to determine proper dosage. Once the baseline is established, each person receives a sticker with their information. To enter the next room they will present their ID to prove they are over 18 and must pass a breathalyzer.
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This second area of the XTC Shop is a whimsical room lined with candy dispensers containing gobs of pressed pills shaped like Donald Trump or the Netflix logo. Brightly-colored patterns adorn the walls and easter eggs, like putting a coin in a specific vending machine for an electronic light show followed by the “pills” and an informational leaflet.
While an actual MDMA dispensary is not the current reality, this pop-up exhibit shows what could be possible. For this kind of experience to truly exist, much of society would need to shift their understanding of drugs like ecstasy. That’s precisely what XTC Shop aims to do, eventually.
For now, advocates are fighting for legal ecstasy in a therapeutic setting. Recreational use is likely far off. However, social experiments like Poppi surely help the movement gain traction, even if the vending machines only provide candy.
