The Bulldog The First

A Living Room for Cannabis Culture.

Amsterdam’s modern cannabis hospitality story developed through two distinct pioneering models.

In 1972, Wernard Bruining and friends established Mellow Yellow in a squatted former bakery. Bruining described it as a teahouse: a deliberately low-profile setting where visitors could drink tea, purchase cannabis or hashish, and consume it together. With no advertising or cannabis imagery outside, Mellow Yellow quietly brought cannabis sales and consumption off the street and into a shared social environment.

In 1975, The Bulldog The First advanced a different model. Henk de Vries created a visible, publicly branded cannabis coffeeshop—an intentionally social place built around hospitality, gathering, and a recognizable identity.

Mellow Yellow pioneered the discreet cannabis teahouse model. The Bulldog pioneered the public-facing cannabis coffeeshop brand. Together, they helped shape what Amsterdam’s coffeeshop culture would become.

The story begins before The Bulldog had a name. In 1970, Henk de Vries brought cannabis to the Holland Pop Festival at Kralingse Bos in Rotterdam and began selling it in matchboxes. The experience planted the seed for a different kind of cannabis space – social, visible, and built around people gathering together.

In 1975, Henk cleared out his father’s former sex shop at Oudezijds Voorburgwal 90 and transformed the small basement into The Bulldog The First. He named it after Joris, his four-legged friend. The space was intentionally informal: more living room than shop, with room to sit, talk, laugh, and relax.

Hard drugs were kept outside. Cannabis was brought into a social setting. Locals, travelers, artists, and free-thinkers mixed together in a room that became known as part of Amsterdam’s emerging coffeeshop culture – and later, as The Bulldog’s ‘Living Room of Amsterdam.’

PERSISTENCE, RAIDS & A CHANGING AMSTERDAM

The early years were not easy. Cannabis remained illegal, and The Bulldog was raided repeatedly. Henk, staff, and customers were arrested again and again. Inside The Bulldog The First today, traces of those years remain – including old hiding places and other reminders of the frequent police raids.

The Bulldog opened during a period when Dutch drug policy was changing. In 1976, the Netherlands formally distinguished cannabis from drugs considered to carry greater risks, helping shape the toleration model that later became closely associated with Amsterdam’s coffeeshops. The Bulldog was one highly visible place where that cultural shift was lived in public.

In 1985, The Bulldog opened The Palace in a former police station on Leidseplein. For a business that had spent years being raided, moving into a former police station was a remarkable symbol of how much the city had changed.

FROM ONE ROOM TO A GLOBAL NAME

What began at number 90 expanded into coffeeshops, bars, hospitality, a hotel, brand stores, merchandise, and international locations. Generations of visitors came to know The Bulldog as part of the Amsterdam experience.

Long before ‘cannabis tourism’ became an industry category, The Bulldog was already welcoming travelers from around the world into cannabis social spaces. Its name and bulldog logo became internationally recognizable symbols of Amsterdam’s cannabis culture.

WHY THIS LANDMARK MATTERS

The Cannabis Trail Cultural Landmark honors more than the growth of a famous brand. It recognizes a person, a place, and more than fifty years of persistence, hospitality, social change, and cannabis culture in Amsterdam.

Tolerance was not abstract here. It was practiced in a room.

People sat together, talked, smoked, laughed, and were welcomed as guests. The Bulldog helped make cannabis culture visible and social at a time when stigma and prohibition still shaped everyday life.

The Bulldog is one chapter in a much larger Dutch cannabis story, but it is an unmistakable one. The Bulldog The First remains at the center of that story: the original Amsterdam home of a brand that carried the city’s coffeeshop culture into the global imagination.

On April 20, 2026, The Cannabis Trail recognized Henk de Vries and The Bulldog The First with its first international Cultural Landmark – connecting Amsterdam to a wider cultural trail honoring the people and places that shaped modern cannabis history.

THE BULLDOG TIMELINE